sierraclub.org - sierra magazine - march/april 2013 - year-life-lonely-oak - that tree: a year in the life of a lonely oak
Photos by Mark Hirsch | Text by Della Watson
As the year of documenting That Tree progressed, Hirsch felt a change in his attitude toward photography. "I've been at this for 25 years," he says. "Photography isn't my hobby; it's my career. I got to a point where I had stopped taking pictures for me. I was depending on all this technology. I still had my vision behind the camera, but I'd lost that freedom I'd felt when I was a beginning photographer." However, the tight artistic constraints of the project—a single tree photographed daily using only a smartphone— reignited his passion for his craft. "This is something fresh and new," he says.