Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.”― Herman Hesse
National Love A Tree Day is celebrated every year on May 16 and it falls right in the middle of Garden for Wildlife Month. Did you know trees actually didn’t exist during the first 90% of Earth’s history? Before trees, Earth had fungi that resembled trees and grew 26 feet tall. Trees have played an irreplaceable role in the smooth functioning of our environment and celebrating a special day dedicated to them is the least we can do to appreciate them.
From well-preserved cellular anatomy, it has been found that Cladoxylopsida were the first species of large trees to appear almost 400 million years ago during the Devonian period. The other earliest trees were thought to be tree ferns, horsetails, and lycophytes.
Trees can be thousands and thousands of years old with many species tending to have long lifespans. Currently, it’s estimated that there are close to three trillion mature trees in the world.
Trees have many benefits: They provide us with lumber, food, nuts, oxygen to breathe, home for wildlife, and much more. Trees are also used for ornamental and decoration purposes. In the United States itself, there are approximately 766 million acres of forest land. On my little slice of Daisy Hill, there’s even a bunch of different species of trees, including two Blue Spruce, which are Colorado’s state tree.
Trees form an essential part of our environment. In recent times, individuals have become so environmentally conscious that a sustainable lifestyle to protect our trees has become the norm. Most people now want to protect and preserve our trees, which make the world a better and safer place to live in.
How I made this photo: This tree was photographed on the edge of a what I remember as being next to Zion Canyon in Zion National Park, Utah. It was captured using a (pre-production) Pentax K100 and smc Pentax-DA 12-24mm f/4 ED AL lens (at 24mm) with an exposure of 1/350 sec at f/6.7 and ISO 400. The image file was processed in Silver Efex and toned using the Platinum toning option in PhotoKit 2.0 to create the final photograph that you see.
Copies of my book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects are available from Amazon with new copies selling for $5.95 with used copies starting around four bucks, way less than your next coffee at a Starbucks drive-through. No Kindle version is currently available, sorry.