Guardian of Lothlorien
This tree kept catching my eye and one afternoon I finally remembered to bring along my camera. The birch stood out dramatically and called to mind the White Trees from Lord of the Rings. I decided to try some color calibration adjustments in Photoshop and was rewarded with nice oranges and yellows replacing the green of the leaves - at that point I knew I’d be advancing time from mid-summer to late fall.
When I was done, though, the tree reminded me more of the golden leaved Mallorn Trees in the forest of Lothlorien than the white tree of Gondor I had originally imagined. Sometimes the wandering of the right brain confounds the methodical plodding of the left brain and brings both to a new magical place.
At this point Toby felt so lost I had to remind him that Lothlorien was a place from the Lord of the Rings story where the last of the elves lived and that it was the only place Mallorn trees still grew. He thought the tree looked like it was protecting them from intruders. ‘Thou shall not pass,’ he thundered!
At that point he remembered that line was from earlier in the book when the wizard Gandalf was trying to defend the hobbits from a Ballhog. Confused again, he asked why Gandalf needed to tell a Ballhog to not pass. ‘Isn’t refusing to pass why they are called ball hogs to begin with?’ I tried to explain to him that he was mixing up the parody, Bored of the Rings with the original but he had wandered off to watch the movies and get to the bottom of things.
A1, SEL100400GM, f/5.6, 194mm, 1/125sec, 125iso
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