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For some the vibrant colours of beech and American oak trees are the summum of what nature has to offer. Photographers flock to photograph forests in all shades of orange, bright yellow and red, I must prefer the duller orange brown shades of oak trees, their understated muted colours not distracting from their amazing branch structures. Oak trees don't need neon colours to be special. The reason I keep coming back to these trees is because of their amazing individuality. Even in alleys, oak trees always look like individuals. On this particularly foggy and cold morning the sun lit up the orange leaves and made them look more vibrant than normal, the duller colours hiding in the foggy areas and the brighter ones where the sun reached them. The tree on the from has some natural zebra stripes on the bark, which I think add to its charm tremendously. This could just be an ode to oak trees ;) This is an awarded photograph
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This artworks is offered by Ellen Borggreve
Ellen Borggreve is a landscape photographer and author of Woodscapes and Praxisbuch Wälder fotografieren, among others. She was born and raised in the woods of the Veluwe where her love for trees originated. Besides forests she also likes to photograph Dutch coastal scenes.
The focus is on tranquil scenes that seem to lie outside everyday reality, without people in the picture, with subjects that are about to disappear often being the subject. The fleeting patterns in the sand, but especially old forest giants that are disappearing at breakneck speed due to climate change.
Ellen is an awarded photographer at 1x and was named one of the world's best landscape photographers by Photoblog in 2019. Her work has been published in books, Nature Photography Magazine, Focus, Landscape Photography Magazine, On Landscape and many other publications. She shares her knowledge gained during her long career as a soft sculpture artist and designer combined with over 40 years of experience in photography in the many articles she writes for Landscape Photography Magazine and also her own blog. She also enjoys teaching where she puts the individual vision of photographers first.