We left Nairobi early, and by mid-morning were well into our journey. I suspect it was not much past eight in the morning when we entered the hill country, catching glimpses of Mt. Kilimanjaro in the far distance.
I saw this tree from the road. My first few shots I tried to capture Kili, before scrambling across the road and back up the hill. The grass was sodden with dew, the sky spotless, the air fresh. The arms of this tree spread where it stood sentinel atop a small hill. Perching the sun just peeking out from behind the trunk so that the rays shone out like star-points, I lined up this shot. The contre-jour approach casts the trunk largely into silhouette, emphasising the gnarled form of the branches, while just a hint of colour still shines through the leaves. With the sun still low in the sky, and much of its light blocked from the sensor by the trunk, the effect is to increase the dynamic range in the foreground rather than throwing it all into silhouette, so that both colour and detail in the grass and the small pink flowers remain. The light catches in the dew, and the overall effect for me is of life, of light and of colour, all framed beneath the drama of that spreading tree. One of my favourite shots from Kenya this year.
