Climbing Trees

I had a trawl back through some photographs I took last month with the Canon Powershot Zoom pocket-monocular-camera-gizmo, and was once again intrigued by the strangely unique files it can (sometimes) deliver. Much of what it gives you is irredeemable rubbish but, once you set aside any conventional criteria for judging the quality of a photograph – you know: sharpness, dynamic range, noise, all that stuff – you realise it is capable of making some very interesting pictures. Which, in the end, is what matters, isn't it?

I mean, just as an example, take that second one above. It may take a closer second look to realise you're not looking at two arched entrances but two gravestones, backed by some kind of twiggy vortex, like a breaking wave. The classic telephoto compression of perspective is what makes this and all the others so compacted, so visually dense, for want of a better word. In particular, I'm increasingly interested in this sort of bird's eye view of tangled tree canopies and thickets: I like the shapes, the colours, and the sense of immersion in a woody world. My tree-climbing days are long gone – I loved climbing trees (thinks: when did I last see a kid climbing a tree?) – but the Zoom is a virtual ladder that can get me up there among the branches again.