150417_trees.dark_012786

I remember seeing this big old bear scratching his back on a tree. I was a kid back then. People, families, were always eating together under the shade of a tree. Birds lived in them. Squirrels too. And while I'm out on my runs I always appreciate the shade of the trees along the roads and dirt trails.

I don't consider myself a landscape photographer. There are so many making beautiful landscape photos. I'm not one of them. But I walk through the woods when I have the chance and am always enthralled by nature. So this day, walking through the winter woods, I imagined the images in black and white. Dark. And the earth and tree trunk rooted there spoke to me. There is chaos and order all at once. A tangle of sleeping earth and trees waiting for Spring to wake and bloom again.

This was taken in the woods near Beaucroissant in the Isere region of France.