Salisbury, Connecticut. We always look forward to this beautiful stand of beech trees on the Appalachian Trail between Salisbury and Lion’s Head on the way to Bear Mountain.

On Mt. Greylock, Massachusetts. Hiking down the Haley Farm Trail on the west side of Mt. Greylock we came across a dead black birch with huge mushrooms on it. Hiked out to the tree and shot straight up hoping to catch the mushrooms but instead got an interesting shot of the creepy decaying tree and the trees around it.

Huntington Library Gardens, Pasadena, California. Went on an outing with my mother today. Decided to use S100 to shoot trees from below since this place has an amazing variety of spectacular and rare trees. I’m quite pleased with the way this small camera worked; I got a nice variety of decent images.

Grant Simon Rogers knows how to shoot trees from below. Wow.

[via Colossal]

Mt. Everett Reservation, Massachusetts. We hiked up Everett and then around Guilder Pond and I caught Dave out on a cliff shooting an island in the pond. Everett isn’t a hard hike although it’s the second highest point in Massachusetts. Guilder Pond is a jewell that makes the entire hike worthwhile. In July the mountain laurel around this pond is mind-blowing.

New York City. Standing in Bryant Park behind the 5th Avenue branch of the New York Public Library shooting south east through the sycamores at the wall of buildings on the other side of the street.

Standing in Bryant Park shooting up at the canopy of sycamore tree branches.

Macedonia Brook State Park, Kent, Connecticut. Dave and I were hiking the other day and I spotted some unusual bark on a tree. On closer inspection the bark was riddled with woodpecker holes up and down the entire tree.

The bird is a yellow-bellied sapsucker and it really likes this tree. As you’ll see in the other pictures, the entire tree is riddled with holes, bottom to top.

Dave thought this tree was close to 100 years old so this is many generations of sapsucker action on it. No other trees in the area showed this kind of woodpecker damage except two other basswood trees a few hundred feet away.

As you’ll see in the last image the tree is still living, amazingly after such a riddling with holes.

Bear Mountain, Connecticut. Hiking around the back side of Bear Mountain we encountered more mountain laurels coated with ice. The hike was both wonderful and terrible: under two feet of snow was running water from rain and melt off and every now and than we’d break through the crust and get soaked in the “stream” under the trail. The pleasures (tortures) of spring hiking…

Bear Mountain, Connecticut. We hiked up Under-mountain trail onto the Appalachian Trail and up onto Bear Mountain the other day and the last 500 feet of elevation gain saw everything coated with ice. It was a beautiful scene and we stood around photographing so long our hands got cold and we had to get moving again. We could have spent hours here with tripods and DSLRs and macro lenses but alas, it was about 20 F with wind, not a great environment for relaxed photography.

Dutch photographer Gerco de Ruijter recently got in touch with an extraordinary series of aerial photographs called Baumschule—some of which, he explains, were taken using a camera mounted on a fishing rod.

The series features “32 photographs of tree nurseries and grid forests in the Netherlands.”

Fantastic stuff. Would be fun to make mosaics out of these.

[via Kottke.org]