Weaving, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I was taking care of Katie Rose one morning while Phyllis got the boys to school. Sitting up in Katie’s little nursery I gave her a bottle and looked out through the ragged screen window. It seemed to me that there were two very different planes: the mesh on the screen, and the trees behind.

Putting Katie in her basinette, I brought up my tripod and camera. At first she was excited, thinking the gear was a new toy for her to play with; soon she became subdued when she saw I wasn’t paying much attention to her.

I did two shots, each with maximum depth-of-field, one focused on the trees and one on the mesh. I combined the two versions in Photoshop with a layer mask and gradient blend. The combination didn’t quite go far enough because the trees weren’t that distinct. So I added a third layer of detail from the winter forest on the Yosemite Valley floor. All along, my vision was in monochrome, so as a last step I did the conversion to black and white.

The idea here involves creating an illusion about visual planes. The structure is a little like Magritte’s The Key of the Fields. Are the trees in front, behind, or on the woven mesh? Can they be all of these at the same time?