The Woods

July 17, 2022

Early February, I went for a hike in the San Gabriel mountains in the Los Angeles area, part of the Los Angeles National Forest. Since I hadn’t been in similar scenery for some time, I felt I had a fresh pair of eyes to focus on finding interesting imagery. 

The trees either still had leaves from the previous Fall or were bare from Winter. In this outing, I honed in on patterns and texture. Specifically, texture created by tree trunks and branches against the blue sky. 

Near the creek, these bare trees created an outright jumble. The early morning cast long shadows of trees behind me, resulting in this scene with a sense of depth from the many intersecting diagonal lines.

Creek II - San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles National Forest, California

To find patterns in the texture, I ended up spending a lot of time looking upward. These smooth trees caught the morning sunlight on one side, highlighting their silvery bark and clean lines.

Woods Against the Sky I - San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles National Forest, California

In stark contrast, the California live oak has a characteristic growing style with many bent branches. The early morning light was still able to lift out a lot of detail in the bark. This was yet again a study in chaos and image-filling texture. It posed its own challenge to find a framing that contributed to the composition, instead of haphazardly cutting off trunks and branches on all sides of the image.

The Woods III - San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles National Forest, California

As the morning progressed, texture in the tree trunks was harder to detect, and against the sky this became more of a two-value image: deep black and something close to white.

The Woods V - San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles National Forest, California