Just Look Around You

OK so by now you know that I photograph Silver Beavers. (Scouting Council Awards given to top Scouters in each Council of the Boy Scouts of America.) Anyway last night I had 7 scheduled to meet me at an LDS church in Spanish Fork, Utah and I did my usual waiting game. However last night was a little bit different. When I arrived I was sitting there thinking about blog material and well there just wasn't anything to photograph. There was major construction going on in the street next to the church and there were several large trees around the church that were dug up and laying in heaps of limbs and dying leaves but this just didn't seem like things I wanted to photograph. As I was sitting there looking at three trees with big red x's on their trunks and thinking about the fact that those were apparently going to be on the chopping block so to speak in the next few days I was a little bit taken back into thoughts of when they were possibly planted and how long they had possibly been growing there near that church. They had most likely been there almost as long as the church and they were probably pretty small when planted.  Then I was looking across at the construction and there near the parked cars in the church parking lot was a tree with the branches kind of wrapping around as though to comfort each other in the terrible loss of the other trees that were there possibly many years before even they were. Here below is the image of what I saw.

Then it hit me and I looked closer at the trees I could see from the chair on the lawn where I was sitting and I suddenly realized that there was some real beauty in the branches of the trees so I took the following images while sitting in one spot surrounded on three sides by these magnificent old trees, at least two of which will not be there in a few short days. Sometimes progress is not progress when you consider things that have stood the test of time and weathered through some tough storms and seen some heavy snow falls collect on their branches. Maybe this is just one way to preserve a little memory of them.





And here again I will leave up to you, the viewer, to see what beauty may come to you from these images and then ask you to look closely at trees around where you live and find in them the beauty that they have to share as well. You might even want to photograph them.