We had a couple of fir trees whose branches had been growing over the driveway for some time. They had reached the point where there was no longer any way to cut them back and keep the trees healthy. So, a couple of months ago, we had no choice but to have them cut down and removed. It sounds silly and probably is, but I felt a twinge of sadness when I came home from work that evening and didn’t see those trees standing in the yard anymore.
Fast forward to this past Friday. We spent most of the afternoon either running from tornados or trying to make our way past fallen trees or downed power lines to get back home. Unlike so many others, we were fortunate. The tornados missed us, and we suffered no damage. But, that didn’t make us appreciate any less the calmness of that evening when it finally arrived.
Standing in the yard that evening watching the sun light the backside (and you can take that however you want to) of a distant thunderstorm, I happened to notice that I was standing next to the stump of one of the fir trees that had been cut down months before. As I looked at it, I began to notice details in it that I hadn’t noticed before: the growth rings, the colors, the different shapes and patterns. It was really amazing. In fact, it reminded me quite a lot of the turkeytail mushrooms I had photographed several years ago.
The light was fading quickly, so I had little time to spare. I quickly ran back inside and grabbed my camera, 24-70mm lens, and tripod and hurried back outside. The stump was flat, so, as I set my equipment up, I made sure the back of the camera and, therefore, the camera sensor were parallel with the surface of the stump. This ensured I would have sufficient depth of field no matter what aperture I used.
My main issue was trying to keep the shutter speed to 30 seconds or less to avoid underexposing the image. However, this proved to be difficult because it was getting darker and darker with each passing second. I had to keep opening the aperture until I finally found one, f/10, that allowed me to keep the shutter speed at 30 seconds, which wasn’t an issue since the stump wasn’t going anywhere.
After double checking everything one last time, I pressed the shutter button and captured this image.