A Walk Through the Park

Beauty comes whenever you look for it.

I have always been a believer that beauty may be found anywhere so long as one looks long enough to find it, indeed, the longer one looks the more beauty is found. Many times plants such as trees and bushes may seem chaotic and unbecoming when viewed from afar, but when you look op close, focusing in one a single branch or a patch of bark a beautiful simplicity emerges that would have been impossible to see otherwise. This was made clear to me on one occasion while I was working as a Camp Loll staff member working in the nature tent having a discussion with the nature director about lichens. In this discussion he talked about how different all kinds of lichens were especially in size. As I went to look as an area on a tree I was amazed at how many different species of lichens I saw in such a small space. Each one contained its own beauty and ellegance, but this could not be seen unless you view them closely, sometimes even requiring the aid of hand lenses. It is for this reason that I seldom take pictures of landscapes or anything of large scale. I prefer to find the simple beauty that comes from looking close. Sometimes I regret that I don't try harder to capture the majesty of alpine landscapes,or the beauty of lakes at sunset, but to be able to find the beauty I the small things pleases me more, for they are not marred by human impact, rather the scarcity of nature in heavily populated area seems to make such things even more beautiful, as they are contrasted by their bleak surrounding.  For this reason I picked the park surrounding the Weber County Main Library as the location for my first photo shoot with my new camera, looking for those moments of clarity where a picture appears.

The lichen growing on a tree as it reaches upwards.

The brightly contrasting colors of the berries make for a great shot.

Still pools of water are always an area of interest to me.

This snow lays on a path though an empty field, I have always liked this path because when the grass around it is growing, it looks very much live the trails found in the Tetons