Kokoro - Wandering Through a Photographic Life

Backstage Kokoro

A "behind-the-scenes" look at selected images in my Kokoro project —
Content, photographic notes, EXIF data, creative process, miscellaneous commentary, and original digital captures. And now with additional audio comments about selected images!

From Kokoro #045 - Silva Lacrimosa

Every living thing has the will to survive, to grow, to endure. With this will to live comes the inevitable sorrow that death will come in its time. The forest is no different, though the primitive consciousness of trees do not allow them to think about this as we can. Even the simple botanicals know and celebrate life in their own way.

I stumbled across the remains of a forest fire in the ponderosa pines. The black bark of the still-vertical trunks seemed to me a testament to their resistance to the consuming flames. I was compelled to photograph them, drawn to the exquisite beauty in the simple tones. From a photographic point of view, they were glowing textures in my viewfinder.

But as I photographed them, their sorrow slowly seemed to unfold. I found myself more and more saddened by the story I began to feel in the charred remains. I knew I was simply projecting my human emotions on the forest, a philosophical flaw that was fallacy. Nonetheless, as I photographed a drip of sap on the sooted bark, I began to cry. The tears of the forest were flowing through me.

We humans do love the forest. It provides for us; it inspires us; it refreshes us. There is life in the forest, life that fills us with the human joy to be alive. The forest is merely plant-life, merely unconscious biology. But what a miraculous biology it is! Perhaps it is right that we should weep at its sorrow.

Original digital capture (downsized for the web)


0.4 sec at f / 16, ISO 160, Sony DSC-R1, 14.3-71.5 mm f/2.8-4.8, 71.5 mm

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