The bokeh floats in the air like bubbles from a bubble wand — a cascade of glimmering spheres, released like captured starlight, drifting through the branches before they, too, dissolve into morning light.

The trees themselves rise like something out of Dr. Seuss, Truffula trees dressed in soft, luminous tufts, more suggestion than substance. Judie vanishes just as fast, darting from one spot to the next in pursuit of squirrels who disappear into the branches — pulled upward and out of reach, while the spheres above surrender to gravity and settle back to the ground.

Shot wide open with the old 55mm PC-Nikkor, the scene slips into something closer to pictorialism than photography — less a record of what stood along the fairway, and more impression of what the morning felt like, dissolving as quickly as it appeared.

I didn’t set out that morning to make soft-focus, grainy, pictorialism-esque images — I simply found myself following the mood, the light, the lens.

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