October 2020 - Marching Trees

We drove along the Garden Route (rather confusingly, this is not about gardens in the British sense, but more about the land and the forests) and at one point I saw this mountain top in the distance. I was struck by the parade of trees along the top – made me think of Mao Tse Tung’s Long March in China in 1948/9 when he was on the way to taking over the country from the warlords who ruled over it. These trees seemed to be marching along the ridge – with some lagging in the rear.

I thought that a picture that showed just this might be good – and indeed when I got back to my Photoshop, it certainly was. It is a stark image, and the conversion to black and white helps to emphasise that aspect; there is a lot of sky above, which I think is necessary to balance the heavy cliffs of the mountain. The weather wasn’t great – and that is apparent from the grey look of the image. I also did a bit of lightening up of the cliff so that there was some detail visible there. All these edits make the picture stand out more, but none of them have messed with the key point of a line of trees marching across a mountain top.