Red Maple - Greene County, Virginia 

When I was in school, along about the fourth or fifth grade, there was a boy in my class named Frank, and he drew trees. I never knew him to draw anything else, but his trees were amazing. Trunk, branches, twigs (his trees never had leaves) were drawn with accuracy and imagination. Frank's trees cast shadows.

I can't draw a tree, or anything else for that matter, but I have taken hundreds of pictures of trees. In the viewfinder I see the shadows of the leaves play across the bark. I see the light filter through the foliage and the way the branches move in the air. The camera records all this with great accuracy, but never quite gets it right, the way Frank did. It takes imagination to draw a tree.