364/365: "What is art but a way of seeing?" ~ Saul Bellow

1 more picture in a note above! :)

Today I took a walk into part of our lower forest with a plan in mind. I was hoping to find the one fern plant which I know of there, and it grows on the side of the seasonal stream bed. Our lower forest looks very different than it once did, because I spent months clearing buck brush and dead trees out, piling them up into habitats for animals. Now, instead of being an impenetrable, ugly mess, the lower forest is open and beautiful, filled with Oak, Manzanita and Madrone trees.

So when I found a very large, mossy tree on the ground, I was quite surprised. Following my eye down the trunk, I saw that it had broken off the base of the tree about three feet up and looked as if it had been dead for a while. I walked up to the trunk and peered inside. At first I didn't see anything but a leaf, but moving my head, the light reflected on droplets below, and straining my eyes in the dim light, I could see the droplets suspended on an invisible web! If I could get my camera to focus on the droplets, my flash would light up the scene and I thought it might just be awesome! It took me a bit of time to find focus, but eventually I was successful, and got a bunch of different apertures to choose from. I hoped that the 2.8 images would be clear because the illusion of droplets floating in the air would be just that much more cool. And...they worked out!! HOORAY!! As it turned out, I have done almost nothing to this image except cropping and adding a very slight vignette!

Saul Bellow (10 June 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. Wiki: Saul Bellow

Explored on December 31, 2013. Highest placement, page 6.