Aidan sat on the grass and leaned back. His back rested against the bark of the pine tree and he brushed back and forth scratching his itchy back against the tree. He looked down at his boots and saw the faded blue drop of ink where her fountain pen had leaked as they stood in front of each other. They were so close they seemed to be breathing the other’s air and somehow the pen she had been holding in her left hand had leaked on to his faded brown boot. He had known in that moment, he had known that he was experiencing something that would be rare in his lifetime but he didn’t know that it would lead him here, to this mountain, to this tree.

I was wandering down Giant’s Head Mountain on a brilliantly sunny summer afternoon. The sun was quite high so I was looking for subjects that were in the shade. I saw this stump that was burned out and had an interesting shape. As I got closer I saw the small tufts of brilliant green moss against the dark stump. I circled around it, trying to find the best angle and I liked the way that the moss stood out against the charred wood. Depth of field was very important here; I wanted the moss in the foreground and the grass in the background to both be out of focus. The dappled sunlight in the grass took on kind of mottled background look that added interest without distracting from the the green on black. The curve of the foreground piece of stump almost nestles the main subject in it’s arm.

-Russell Berg