This photograph is from Panannick Hill, one of a towering, ridge-like series that forms the nest around Ballater, Scotland. An hour from that moment,a surprise blizzard covered the whole area in snow, hills and valley alike, whiting out everything. But, before that happened, my cousin and I grabbed some sandwiches from a local shop, headed over the bridge crossing the River Dee, and into the roving grounds of his youth. He showed me this scene and said he always delighted in it, and never really knew why exactly.

I used a combination of an 81b cooling filter and Y1 yellow filter to create green, all mounted on the end of my 50mm Nikkor 1.8 using the Cokin filter system. The combination green filter lightened gives the scene an oddly artificial spotlight despite the naturalness of the scene, whose odd glow and desperate appearance are brought into focus with an f/8 aperture at 1/30 on 200 ISO Kodak black and white film.

In a growing age of technology and urbanization, the forest is a dwindling playground for those children of the earth that are left. The marvels therein are destroyed sometimes before they are ever beheld. With all the pollutants not only in the air, but in the water as well, with the drying effects of increase water consumption due to human population growth (we are at 7.5 billion worldwide, supposed to be 8 billion by the end of the year) that is helping to lead to an increase in forest fires across the world, only adding to the air pollution causing global warming, I would not be surprised if this were the image of the soul of all the growing earth: weary and tattered.