Two trunks hold their ground here, the only dark verticals in a field gone entirely to glare.
Everything else has given up its edges — the light behind them doesn’t glow so much as flood, pooling into soft white shapes that overlap until you can’t tell where one ends and the next begins.
Shot wide open on the same old PC-Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 (1969–1979), deep in the Lake Arbors canopy, the lens does what it always does: turns specular light into something rounder and slower, like the whole background is breathing out at once.
Looking at it again, I keep landing on Brassaï — Avenue de l’Observatoire, from Paris de Nuit, 1933. His bare trees stand the same way mine do, a row of dark verticals holding their shape against everything trying to dissolve them, streetlamps behind them blooming into soft halos the fog won’t let stay sharp-edged.
He had a car’s headlights cutting a long pale wedge low across the wet pavement in the foreground; I’ve got my own low band of blown-out light doing something similar along the bottom of the frame, a horizontal seam of white the trees stand just behind.
His fog and my lens are doing the same job by different means — both taking a scene that could be crisp and letting the light itself become the subject, softening everything except what refuses to bend.
Where we part ways: his is night, mine is morning. His trees are bare branches against a lamp-lit Paris avenue; mine are Colorado canopy backlit by the sun. But the two of us, ninety-some years apart, both ended up pointing a camera at dark trunks standing sentinel in a wash of light too diffuse to hold.
The two trees here don’t fight the glare. They just stand there, side by side, like old friends who’ve seen this kind of morning before and know better than to look away from it.
Judie was somewhere off to the left, unbothered, while I stood still and let the frame fill up with light — and let an old photograph I love quietly step into the frame with me.
You don’t capture a morning like this so much as you’re caught by it, reminded by it.
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