The Dancer

This dead tree has an interesting shape. It reminds me of a dancer (perhaps a woodland nymph or a dryad as they’re called in Greek mythology). I found it in a small clearing (maybe 10 square metres) amongst acres and acres of woodland. It’s surrounded by trees for as far as you can see.

A few trees lie dead on the ground but most are alive and bursting into colour with their vibrant late Spring/early Summer foliage. The floor around the tree is littered with dead leaves and the bracken from previous years but in places you can see bluebells and new ferns that have emerged into the sunlight. One to add to the collection after another day exploring Padley Woods with my camera.

The task (as always) was to create a successful photograph by ‘seeing’ order within the chaos. At first glance an ancient wood is chaotic. Potential photographs are everywhere but finding ones worthy of keeping and sharing is difficult. It’s like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. It becomes a little easier to find that needle once you realise the chaos isn’t as random as it first seems. The visual order needed to make a woodland scene work as a photograph (the composition) is there if you look closely enough.

James Gleick and one of my favourite photographers Eliot Porter explored that idea in a book called ‘Nature’s Chaos’. They suggest that woodland, for example, only looks chaotic if you look at it as a whole. Break a wood down visually into smaller and smaller parts and you discover order - “aesthetically stimulating fragments” as Porter called them, or good photographs (keepers) as I would call them. The ‘closer’ you look, the more orderly Nature becomes and good photographs start to emerge from all the chaos. This photograph, ‘The Dancer', is an example of that process.