Coat of Many Colors

The first time I saw one of these I thought someone had painted it. Rainbow eucalyptus doesn't look like it belongs in the natural world, or at least not in the part of it I grew up in. This is a mature tree on Kauai, shot close so the frame is nothing but bark.

The colors are all one process. The tree sheds its outer bark in strips through the year, and what's underneath comes in bright green. From there it ages, going blue, then purple, then orange and rust and a dusty red before it peels off and starts over. Every strip is on its own schedule, so a single trunk carries the whole sequence at once, in vertical bands with ragged edges where one layer is still lifting away from the next. Lime green next to bluish purple next to yellow and pink. I didn't do anything to those colors in post beyond what I'd do to any file.

Shooting it is mostly about restraint. Point a camera at a trunk like this and it's easy to end up with a mess, because there's color everywhere and no obvious subject. I worked the trunk until I found a section where the bands lined up and the peeling edges gave me some rhythm, and I let the rest go. What I wanted was for it to read as a surface first and a tree second, so you spend a second figuring out what you're looking at.