Two spheres of light merge at the center like a pair of held hands, glowing so brightly they nearly become one shape — a soft figure-eight suspended in the dark canopy above. Two softer spheres hover just overhead, and it’s the trunk thinning out beneath them that first catches the eye, the tree barely holding its own light. Around them, the background scatters into repetitive circles of black and white, some sharp-edged, some dissolving entirely into the grain.
A branch cuts a thin, deliberate line across the lower third, the one solid gesture in an otherwise formless frame — as if the tree reached down just far enough to remind you it was still there. Below it, the foreground opens into a wash of white, vignetted with the barest trace of shadow, blown out and featureless, the way morning light does when it stops describing things and just floods them.
Shot wide open with the old 55mm PC-Nikkor, this one leans furthest into abstraction — barely a photograph at all.
More an open field of light, like a vacant ice rink on a cold night, and a memory of standing under trees while the light did something I couldn’t quite follow with my eyes, only with the lens.
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