Adventitious Bud Snow Gum

[Maris]

Adventitious Bud, Snow Gum
Gelatin-silver photograph on Ultrafine Silver Eagle VC FB photographic paper, image size 24.7cm X 19.3cm,
from a 8x10 Kodak Tmax 400 negative exposed in a Tachihara 810HD field view camera fitted with a Fujinon-W 300mm f5.6 lens.

Snow Gum trees have many adventitious buds just under the bark but they do not sprout
because they are suppressed by the apical dominance of growing points higher in the tree.
Here a bud has emerged because a branch above it was broken by the weight of last winter's snow.
The jagged little shadow disrupts the flow of abstract grey tones.

[Mick Fagan]

Quite the find there Maris.

Usually one sees these after a bushfire has gone through, and then the plant is sometimes almost covered with them. Not so in this instance.

I particularly like the shadow formation, quite magical.

[Maris]

Thanks Mick for your sympathetic insights on this one.

I've heard it said that view camera photography is principally an exercise in intense looking
with some camera work and printing thrown in at the end.
With enough looking one can eventually see things that are not quite there. The Snow Gum should have been wet for a gleaming mother-of-pearl pattern on the bark. But it was dry. I could come back next year but then the bud would be a twig? I may never pass that way again? Why keep a big expensive sheet of Tmax 400 film in the hope for something else? Better to shoot now and then rue or celebrate the consequences.