For years, artist Michael Kenna has wowed me with his photographic masterpieces from the great places of the world… Paris, Kiev, Angkor, Rio de Janiero, and many other locales both modern and ancient. Then a few months ago he started posting a series of images from a beautiful “grandfather oak” in Beaverton -fricking- Oregon.

Now, no shade toward my home state AT ALL. Oregon is a lovely subject for any photographer, but never would I have predicted that one of my favorite photographers of all time would choose to highlight, of all parts of the state, a suburb of Portland. Naturally, though, his choice of subject in that particular tree is undeniably worthy of attention, and Kenna has highlighted its majesty with his usual aptitude.

It turns out that I have found myself enamored of the trees in Beaverton, Oregon on occasion as well. And, while I most definitely lack Kenna’s skill, I’m quite fond of this particular image of a copse of trees in the Cooper Mountain Nature Park on the southern side of the ‘burb.

This shot is an old one, taken almost 10 years ago while on an afternoon hike. I’m lucky to still have the RAW data file for the image as much of my older work was lost with only JPGs remaining. That would have been a terrible shame because at the time I took this image I was going through an unfortunate HDR phase and the JPGs I saved were, well, gross.

In any case, I’m thankful for Kenna’s reminder that beautiful artistic subjects surround us at all times, even (or perhaps especially) in the places we have come to view as mundane.

Prints of this image are available in various formats at RedBubble.