The bokeh stacks up here like a wave cresting toward shore — one behind the other, layer over layer of dissolved light, with the shadowed trunks the only thing still willing to stay dark and still.

This one came from deep in the canopy at Lake Arbors, wide open on the old PC-Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 (1969–1979), a lens that renders light in soft, round pools rather than clean specular hits — the kind of blur that looks less like foliage than like foam catching the sun just before it breaks.

Judie stopped to sniff something right as the whole frame felt like it was mid-collapse, light rolling forward and never quite landing.

This Photograph wasn’t taken so much as arrived at.

back to B&W –