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'I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree'. I don't know what sort of tree the poet Joyce Kilmer had in mind when he penned these famous words, but I bet it wasn't this one!
Battered and stunted by the prevailing winds coming up the west face of Moel Famau in North Wales, this particular tree would always be waiting to greet me as I started my morning climbs up the local hill.
Recently however, the carpark I use, next to which this tree survived, has undergone an extensive re-modelling and now looks really nice and touristy, with new pavement and reconstructed drystone walls. It's all very nice, but imagine my sorrow when I arrived early one morning for a climb to find the battered old tree, that had braved the elements and clung to existance for so long, had been ripped up. All that was left was a hole in the ground, and, poigniantly, a small bunch of withered flowers left previously by a mourner of another, altogether more human, tragedy.
I still made my climb that morning, but with a somewhat heavy heart as I pondered the fragility of life. I'm just glad I took this photograph of the battered and bent old tree, looking its best in the last of the evening light, before it was gone forever.
Filename - tree 06.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 1/5sec @ f16, ISO100
Location - Moel Famau, North Wales
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Polarising filter used to darken sky.
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