Book Review: Pakenham, T. (2003). Meetings with remarkable trees. 1st ed. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Illustrated.

This is a lovely book, a collection of 60 photographs of the UK’s biggest and most ancient trees.  Each photo includes a brief essay with anecdotes about the tree’s history and current condition.  There is quite a lot of botanical lore, including how many of these species found their way to the British Isles.

I was looking at the text mostly from a photographer’s point of view to get ideas about my own project on trees in my Dubai neighborhood.  Some observations about the images here.  There appear to be three main compositions:

• Full portrait, in which most of the tree is seen within the frame
• Partial portrait, with branches running out of the frame
• Tight portrait, usually of some feature of the trunk

Except for the last, most of the images include very little foreground and contain a person or two to provide scale.  What non-human items could substitute?  One option might be a series of self-portraits with trees.  But for one or two examples, all the trees are living.   There are no night photos, ho high key, low key, or silhouettes, but representative images from different seasons.

I also note a few imaging issues.  The upper branches of full portrait shots sometimes show chromatic aberration.  One image has within the branches different colored patches of sky.  Focus is often a problem at the top of very tall trees.  And a few images seem to have too much blown out background.

This has been an inspiring book.  I’m ready to head off in search of some amazing trees.  This summer I’ll be visiting my family in Georgia and have found several references to historic and champion trees.  I hope I can visit a few.  I wonder if there are any to visit in the UAE or Oman?  Time to start asking around.

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