Just Look

Pine trees are green. Everybody knows this. When we look at a mountainside, or down a twisting river canyon, they all appear to be roughly the same shade — right? But look carefully at the differences in color between these trees. Dark, light, deep, bright, yellowed, reddish, some even blue.

This photograph, especially printed large, really shows that diversity. This is the type of image designers sample from when building a color palette — an almost infinite variety of green. I asked AI to identify distinct shades. It found 69. Here are some of the more unusual ones:

Black Spruce, Shadow-Teal, Bitterbrush Olive, Verdigris, Rotten-Log Moss, Glacial Mint, Fog-Choked Emerald — and 62 more.

It’s like anything in life. The closer you look, the more subtlety you see. The closer you get to know something, the more nuance reveals itself. There’s no limit to it. As we develop our eye and our sensibilities, we begin to notice things we couldn’t have seen before.

But the variety of green in this picture is just one demonstration of the subtlety possessed by every aspect of nature — whether it’s a pine forest along a rushing river, a desert hillside, the evening sky, a bark beetle, a granite wall, a butterfly, even your own hands.

Infinitely detailed and as rich as blackstrap molasses. For those willing to just look.