Imperfect Beauty
“In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful.”
Alice Walker
It was a frantic pre-dawn race. We were darting from location to location desperately seeking a suitable spot to capture sunrise illuminating the Sierra Nevada mountains in the Owens Valley in California.
There was no way to predict where the light would be favorable. The clouds were dissipating, sometimes just before drifting into the scene. Then the clouds would reform elsewhere leading us to yet another location.
And to make it more maddening, the sun on the Sierra Nevada mountains was being intermittently blocked by yet other fickle clouds.
At one of our hurried stops, the light on the mountains finally appeared. But finding a foreground was now the issue. This pair of trees framed the distant peak nicely.
Their contorted shapes didn’t initially appeal to me. They seemed so imperfect that I only took two images before running back in the car and racing to yet another area.
But friends Jon Christofersen, Mike Loebach, and I never found a better view. My only photograph with potential from that morning included those trees.
Alice Walker
Alice Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.
She is perhaps best known for her novel The Color Purple. The book led to her 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first for an African American woman.
While reviewing my two images from the morning, I began to understand and appreciate Walker’s view of nature. These trees did seem to possess a certain beauty in their imperfection.
The Shot
Once I reframed my thinking about the trees, the processing was relatively simple. But there were only a few small clouds in the original capture.
This is my first and only sky replacement using Photoshop. Normally, I only use the sky that nature provides. This is an exception, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever replace a sky again.
Thanks for looking,
Chuck Derus