Foto Friday: The Lone Tree

The Lone Tree, Crater Lake National Park, Oregon. © 2024 Eric D. Brown

I stopped at Crater Lake National Park for a few nights on my way up to a longer trip on the Oregon coast. The plan was simple…find a place to get a sunset photo over the lake, the wildfire smoke had other ideas.

There was no color that evening. The sky was washed out, hazy, the kind of flat light that makes you want to pack up and head back to camp. But I’d already made the drive out, so I kept looking around.

That’s when I noticed this tree.

It was standing alone on the rim, silhouetted against the smoky sky, with the lake below and nothing else around it. Without any real color to work with, I decided to go black and white to strip it down. Let the tree carry the image on its own.

I shot it, liked it, and moved on. But looking at it now, months later, I can think of twenty other ways I could have worked that scene. Different angles, different focal lengths, getting lower, getting closer, waiting for the light to shift even further. In the moment, I locked in on one composition and photographed it. I wasn’t thinking about what else was there.

I had tunnel vision out there. I came for a sunset, the sunset was gone, so I found this tree and locked in. I wasn’t walking the rim, I wasn’t thinking about what the smoke was doing to the light, I wasn’t looking at what else was there. I had a replacement and I held onto it.

Some of those other frames are probably better than this one. I’ll never know because I wasn’t looking for them.

More of my photography at imagesbyericbrown.com or on Instagram .