Branch needs a name

Such a face
London, ON
August 2015
To share your own monochrome Thematic, head here

Occasionally we see things that make us do a double-take, and this forlorn remnant of a once-vibrant tree would easily qualify.

It sits just off of a busy bike path, and while I stared at it and wondered what kind of animal it looked like, more than a few cyclists stared as they rode past, probably wondering what I had been smoking. A couple of them even doubled back after a few minutes - I'm sure they thought I was up to no good.

The doubts of strangers aside, I had to stretch a bit to get this shot. Because just above the wood-critter's head, based on my, ah, limited height and position on the path, the cloudy-hot-humid sky background threatened to ruin my prospects for a reasonable exposure. Dynamic range can make or break you, and pics with huge transitions from bright to dark backdrops create all sorts of exposure hell in the process.

So to cut the angle and level-out the background as you see here, I backed way up. Then I climbed on a decaying log. And tried to compose and balance all at the same time. I'm sure the cyclists who returned for another look were amused. But in the end, I blotted out the sky and got the shot.

My only remaining questions are simple ones: Can you see what I see? And if you can, what name should we assign to this proto-critter?