One tree, five times over, stepping down a hill that is slowly dissolving into mist.
This photograph was taken in the valley of Amarbayasgalant Monastery in northern Mongolia, one of the country’s most sacred places and a landscape I have been visiting for many years as a tour guide. While my group was exploring the monastery grounds, I walked the other way and found a single tree standing on a hillside against an open sky.
The image was created using in-camera multiple exposure: handheld, each frame shifted slightly from the last. The same tree appears five times, stepping diagonally down the slope from upper left to lower right. The nearest is the darkest and sharpest, and each one behind it is paler and more transparent, until the farthest is little more than a suggestion in the haze.
At 300mm, the telephoto compression flattens the hills into soft horizontal bands. Their edges fade from near black in the foreground to almost white at the horizon, the way distant ridges do in morning mist. Most of the frame is empty sky, which gives the trees room and keeps the image very quiet.
It is one tree, but it reads as a procession, or as a single moment remembered at different distances.
This print suits spaces that value stillness and restraint: a bedroom, a study, a minimal interior with pale walls and natural light.
EXIF data of the photograph
- Camera Model: NIKON Z 7
- Lens model: TAMRON SP 70-300mm F4-5.6 Di VC USD
- Date taken: 5. 7. 2026
- Exposure time: 1/320s
- F-Number: f/10.0
- ISO speed ratings: 800
- Focal length: 300mm
- Size of the photo: 8256 x 5504px
