I make fun of people who see things in rocky cliffs. Then I do it anyway. So it was with these stumps. When the sun is low you can see so many shapes in them: radial and circumferential lines, cracks and insect holes, and even tool-like salients.
Whether or not it is true that no two fingerprints or snowflakes are identical, it definitely seems true of decaying stumps. Like fine old buildings "seasoning" in sun and water, these stumps become quirkier with antiqueness.
Time, water, sun and bugs...nature's four fingered sculptor has done his work on these like he has on the sandstone layers of red-rock Utah--but these stumps are a humbler clay.
One stump looked like the aerial photo of the San Francisco Peaks. I kept walking around it, admiring it. But the photograph belittled its three-dimensionality. The best I could do was find stumps that had interesting two-dimensional shapes. But they were still too dark and colorless. This isn't the first time that I've been stumped by the camera. Maybe Edward Abbey really was right about the silly things.
I was reluctant to write about this since I didn't want to get teased about giving so much attention to stumps instead of the San Francisco Peaks. But after you've seen a mountain...you've seen it. Some other angle is needed to give you a challenge and sustain your interest.
On the way home I dropped my keys and feared that a long search would be needed. But some days, you get lucky.
Later, when the sun was quite low I noticed this "solar eclipse" coming from sunlight catching the rim of a metal pan.
I starting backing up the computer and noticed colors coming off of the CD disk. They are splendid interference gratings. There was just a little sunlight left now. I went outside with the camera and the disk. The colors were more vibrant in negative mode. These photos are not software-enhanced.
