A wonderful battered old Gary Oak on the shores of Vancouver Island. Canon EOS XSi EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.4 1/4000 ISO 200
The wind blows here. It winds and twists over the rocks and finds its way through the trees to the place where you are sitting. The wind does find you but not until after the trees have negotiated a kind of peace for you. They have protected you and they are true. You look out from your protected space at the centre of the grove and the sweep of the ocean, the grand rise of the mountains on the mainland, and these trees they all seem to conspire to give you peace. They all seem to slow your mind and calm your spirit and you take a deep breath.
There is a wonderful grove of twisted, gnarled old Gary Oak trees at Piper's Lagoon in Nanaimo that is really beautiful. The trees have grown up on the shore line and have twisted and turned themselves in an apparent attempt to get out of the wind. They stand on top of a hill that overlooks the Georgia Strait. I wanted to capture the texture of the bark of these trees so I opened up my lens as far as it would go to get that shallow depth of field and isolate the tree against the background. I got the shot I wanted but I still wanted to emphasize the texture of the bark some more so I added a bleach bypass filter in Nik Colour Efex Pro.
-Russell Berg