“Even the most common, the familiar, the passed by, can show beauty when we just pause to appreciate it” – Ed Lehming 2026

I’ve made a practice of looking for beauty in ordinary places. We can’t always be in exotic locations, and every day is seldom perfect or jaw-dropping. Most of us live in places that are, or over time, become, commonplace to us. Given that this is often the reality, many years ago I set out to deliberately photograph the ordinary things I would normally pass by or take for granted as just part of the background.

This cottonwood tree, for example, stands by the path that carries me from the parking lot to a local beach. I have some very nice shots of this tree; given the right light and good framing, it is quite lovely. However, from this angle, as seen when leaving the beach, it generally seems a bit boring, and thousands of beachgoers pass it by without a second glance. But on this day, I decided to shoot it as it is, stripping away all the background color and distractions so that just the raw tree showed. I was amazed at what I normally would not see, consciously.

There is beautiful texture to the bark, creating an almost pencil sketch appearance when rendered in monochrome. There is a rough symmetry to the trunks as they rise and separate, and the smaller trees, generally overlooked, start to emerge from the background. Through observation, what was once unexciting begins to reveal so much more than I had imagined when I shot the image.

iPhone 17 Pro Max
Main Camera — 35 mm
1/60 sec, ƒ/1.78 ISO 160