For a couple of years this birch eluded my efforts to portrait it with the river flowing nearby in the background; I was framing it from the ground, trying to grab the three-dimensional (or should I say “tree-dimensional”?) complexity of its twisted “foot”, almost two meters wide, grown on a river bank that got eroded in time; I had no success whatsoever, no matter how awkwardly and painfully I was stretching my neck and my super-stiff back.
A few days ago, as I was standing on the edge of a rock nearby, I suddenly realized – almost casually – that an entirely different approach was possible: looking down from a vertical point of view what I was giving up in terms of 3-D effect and environment, I was gaining in compositional harmony and overall balance, and there I had my shot, albeit a different one. And it was even painless.