Seeking Lone Trees

Image 1: A multiple exposure shot of this dead rowan in a graveyard

There’s something about a lone tree. Is it the sense of solitude? Or the power of resilience against the elements?

Either way, a well positioned lone tree is a super photographic subject and in this post I’ll walk you through some of my compositional thinking when I come find one. They do tend to be quite elusive on Skye because the deer always eat the shoots and any leaves that manage to make it through spring. However, with perseverance, it is possible to find them clinging to cliffs that the deer can’t reach or perched on a rock out of harm’s way.

I’ve made it a bit of a mission to search out these survivors. Often they are spectacularly twisted having been blasted by incessant gales. Or in the case of the one in the image above, already dead with just their bare branches remaining.

Most of the time they are very hard to spot. Being inaccessible to deer, they tend to be hard to reach for intrepid photographers as well. Most of the time they will be far from roads, camouflaged against a hillside or hidden beyond a false summit.

Once found, the next problem arises. How to photograph it? Tree pictures are notoriously difficult. Sure, you can just point your camera at it and have a nice picture of a tree. But how to get something more interesting that connects somehow with the viewer’s emotions?

In these situations, I call on my patented compositional process - “less is more and more is more”, which I’ll explain in detail in an upcoming post. However, it boils down to removing distractions while adding complementary elements. It’ll all make sense, honest.

Looking at Image 1, the scene is a very nice graveyard that I’ve shot many times before, usually at night. During the daytime, it is quite a confusing scene with gravestones at strange angles, a wall, benches, tufty grass and other things that make it hard to get a simple and clean composition. I wanted to get a sense of other-worldliness and strangeness, so elected to go for a multi-shot blended exposure to bring out the form of the dead rowan tree and get rid of all the other distractions. And it is monochrome because that what I need for my new book, however removing colour is a great way to also remove distractions.

Using my Ricoh GR3X, I simply set it into multiple-exposure mode and circled the tree, taking a shot at every stop, until I’d done a complete circuit. You can see the multiple exposure building up as you do this, which is great and helps to get the framing right. The result is a weird, eye-catching photograph that asks questions and invites further study.

Images 2 and 3. Same tree, different compositions.

For Images 2 and 3, the situation was very different. I found this spindly windswept tree clinging onto a steep rock slope. It had a nice angular trunk and it was quite easy to determine which way the prevailing wind blow. But…how to photograph it?

Being a spot that deer can’t get to, it was a very awkward spot for me too. Before getting my camera out, I had a good look around, inspecting many different angles of attack. Behind the camera in shot 2 is a spectacular mountain scene, but it was impossible to include due to the slope of the rock which must have been 70 degrees or so. I would have ended up above the tree shooting down to include it and would need some sort of weird fisheye lens to include the mountains.

Using the “less is more” principle, I decided to shoot it silhouetted against the sky, removing as much distraction as possible. For shot 2, I ended up kneeling in a large puddle to get my camera low enough to frame things properly. I wanted a simple geometric shape in the rock to match the angles in the tree trunk, and much shuffling about led to the shot you see above. Just moving 30cm left or right resulted in a very different-looking shot. I decided to use f/1.7 to emphasise the tree as the subject, not the foreground rocks leading to it. So…nice enough.

While kneeling in the puddle puzzling how to compose the shot, I noticed the way the wind was blowing ripples on the surface. Hmmm…interesting. Once I had image 2 “in the bag” I started experimenting. Could I get something more interesting by adding another component to the shot while removing some others. My “less is more, more is more” approach coming to the fore.

With some experimentation, and patience waiting for the wind to blow a bit but not too much, I could see a reflected tree in the water’s surface with the grass under the water showing through. Nice. No more foreground rocks, the tree as the obvious shot, but with a puzzling and interesting “background” (actually a foreground, but let’s not nitpick).

The image is then flipped to have the tree the “right” way up. I think this was shot at f/11 to get the grass and tree in focus, and I also have versions at f/1.7 which blur out the grass but don’t have quite the same impact. I really like the end result in Image 3. Like Image 1, it invites questions and further study, or maybe just a “what’s going on there” reaction which is much better than ambivalence.

Image 4: Shattered limestone

Another massive puzzle was the tree in Image 4. This one was also positioned precariously on a steep rocky slope amongst the sharpest fractured limestone I’ve come across.

Not only were the fissures leg-breaking should you drop into one at the wrong ankle, but the top edges of the rock fragments were serrated and sharp as knives.

As a result it was quite a challenge just to move around, let alone figure out how to take a picture of the scene. In these situations, I usually find it easier just to leave the camera and tripod behind and walk around the location looking at it from as many different angles as possible. This helps to keep balance and avoid slicing one’s hands to ribbons.

After several circumnavigations of this tree, I settled on the composition you see here. The foreground limestone can make for an incredibly confusing scene so I wanted to try and bring some order to it somehow. Having this almost contiguous fissure leading up to the tree was my answer. It gives the resulting image some structure and form.

To keep a good amount of the image in focus, I used an aperture of f/9, with 1/250th ISO 100.

Image 5: Old and new

To finish off, Image 5 is a different type of shot. Less stylised and more “documentary”. I have a series on Poles, which I’m enjoying just as much as the seeking out lone trees. It encompasses all types of otherwise boring power and telecoms poles photographed in what I hope is an interesting manner.

There is a run of pylons that stride across the Skye landscape from Glenelg in the south all the way up north. They are a bit of an eyesore on the landscape, but vital for the island’s infrastructure and people. I have been looking for an interesting way to photograph one of them. They are a bit dull just by themselves, and I have plenty of shots of lines of poles disappearing into the landscape, so I wanted something a bit different.

Enter a large lone tree. Some bog-hopping was needed to get to it, at which point my usual circumnavigation-without-a-camera was carried out to find a decent composition that incorporated at least one of the pylons and the tree. I tried several different setups, and settled on the one you see above. Quite simple, and a nice juxtaposition of the old and twisted tree with the new and very rigid, symmetrical pylon.

This photography thing really is enjoyable, particularly if you have a project or theme to work on (I have twelve themes I’m shooting for at the moment). It really helps to give me focus and stretches my creative thinking. I think theme-based or project-based photography is a fantastic way to explore my own boundaries and motivate me to get out in the fresh air to find new opportunities.