Sun Through Pine

Himalayan Foothills, India · landscape

Late-morning sun bursts between the branches of a single pine, the sky deep blue behind, ragged clouds at the edges. The light arrives in a clean spiked star.

Pines in the lower Himalayas are different from the pines further south — they grow taller, denser, with darker needles, and they hold a particular kind of light at midday. Backlit, the canopy becomes an irregular black lattice, and any gap in the branches lets the sun through as a hard star that the camera reads as a flare.

I was standing directly under this one, looking up at maybe seventy degrees from horizontal. The sun was high but not at the zenith, which meant the rays fell at an angle and the flare took a slightly asymmetric shape. The sky behind was the deep saturated blue you only get at altitude. A few of last summer's pine cones still hung at the tips of the branches, dried out and the same dark grey as the wood. There is a kind of photograph that depends entirely on aiming the camera at the sun and trusting the lens to do something interesting. Sometimes it pays off. This was one of those.

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