As this canopy of light overtakes the trees, there’s something almost otherworldly happening — the light doesn’t just filter through the canopy, it overwhelms it, dissolving branch and leaf into pure glowing circles of bokeh.
The highlights stack and cluster, dense in some places and scattered in others, so that the image reads less like morning light on trees in July and more like a Christmas tree on a snow-blanketed December morning — that same warm scatter of lights half-buried in white, glowing from within rather than reflecting from without.
The vintage PC-Nikkor is doing exactly what I want it to here — no sharp edges to hold onto, nothing literal left of the trees at all, just the memory of light passing through them. It’s less a photograph of a canopy and more a photograph of what light does when it stops caring about the thing it’s shining through.
This photograph viewed now — created a week earlier but only fully developed in my mind today — this image feels more like dawn in the Christmas holiday season than an early summer morning. Less the beginning of a summer day, more the hush of a winter one.
A photograph like this is less taken than taken in — a long inhale and a slow exhale.
Meditative.
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