Polychrome

Shooting bark in the rain is not the obvious call, but wet bark goes deeper and more saturated than dry bark, and the color here came up richer than anything I got on a clear day. The cost is glare. A wet trunk kicks specular highlights off every curve and every lifted edge, and those blow out white and wipe out the color under them. I ran a polarizer and worked it, rotating and watching the reflections fall away. You can still find beads of water sitting on the surface if you look for them, which is the only clue in the frame that it was raining.

The crop is vertical, 2:1, a tall slice of trunk and nothing else. What makes this one different from my other rainbow eucalyptus shot is the range. No purple, no blue. This tree was cycling through green and orange, and the strips come in every step between them — lime, olive, a gray-green that reads almost teal at the right edge, then yellow, apricot, and a hot orange in the freshest peels. A few narrow slivers of dark red sit in the seams where the oldest bark is still hanging on.

The shapes are what held me. Each strip tapers to a point as it peels, so the whole panel runs in long vertical flames, overlapping and layered, with hard edges where one color cuts into the next. It looks brushed on. I framed it with no bark edge, no sky, no leaves, nothing to give away the scale, so it takes a beat before you land on what it is.