I had a Mexican Fan Palm planted in my own backyard when I moved to Phoenix 12 years ago. It has already grown higher than my house, and perhaps someday, long after I’ve moved on, it will top 100 feet. Its thick trunk is ringed with the remnants of palm fronds that have long since been pruned away. I thought these fanciful stubs, fringed in wispy hairs, would make a more expressive photograph than the overall tree itself. And what better challenge for a brand new camera’s very first assignment than a close-up of nature in my own, all-too-familiar backyard? I had just taken delivery of my 10MP Panasonic Lumix FZ-50, and wanted to see how it would render texture, detail and color. I was delighted with the resulting image, and look forward to making thousands of new images with the FZ-50’s remarkable Leica zoom lens. I made this photograph deep in the shade of the palm tree’s own huge fronds. I set my white balance, as usual, on “cloudy” -- warming the color as I prefer. Using my spot-metering mode, I exposed on the brightest part of the wood to bring out the maximum detail in the stubs and the fragile hairs that surround them. These stubs are like an old, well-used skin that still clings to a body -- an interwoven patchwork of frond stubs reminding us of both life and death. As with us all, a tree begins to die the day it is born, and this is how it displays the reminders that mark its passage through life.