outdoor textures

I am much better at capturing photographs than catching fish. (It’s not that I’m a good photographer, it’s just that I’m a terrible fisherman.) So while this past weekend was a fishing trip, I actually spent more time using my camera than my fishing pole. And it’s been a while since I’ve done a 7shots post. (It was supposed to be a weekly thing, but I’ve obviously been lazy.) So I spent a good amount of time taking random photographs.

Lassen National Forest has an amazing variety of scenery, from wide open forests to claustrophobic caves, to wide expanses of lava rocks. They all make for interesting pictures. But I have a ton of those kind of pictures already. This time around I spent a lot of time crouching down low to capture that scenery up close. All that variety of scenery makes for an interesting set of textures.

Lassen National Forest is obviously a forest. A forest is filled with trees. (duh.) Trees have bark. (also duh.) I always though the rough texture of a pine tree’s bark was pretty interesting.

Underneath the bark of a fallen tree is the smooth wood, and often the fallen trees are crawling with bugs like as ants and beetles. It’s interesting that they always seem to be traveling in the direction of the wood grain.

Speaking of bugs, here’s a writhing mass of them on a cocoon. I would characterize this texture as fuzzy. I would characterize the whole writhing mass of bugs as nasty.

Large areas of the forest near Hat Creek were decimated by fire. There’s a lot of charred dead wood on the ground, but also a lot of new life rising out of the ground around it. The fire seems to accentuate the natural textures of the wood grain.

There are huge fields filled with lava rock. Rough, sharp rocks that scrape your knees when you fall on them because you’re looking through your camera instead of watching where you walk.

Pine cones look interesting up close. Kind of sharp and foreboding.

The roof of a cave appears pretty rough. It has bright specks in it which look like gold.

Bonus shot: I suppose water doesn’t have a texture, per se, but I always like the smooth, creamy look of running water that is captured with a slow shutter speed.