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When I first thought of taking a photo of the above tree in Mount Pleasant today it was because I liked the upside-down "paint drips" of the thin vertical branches. Then a completely different idea came to me.

I considered how similar the photo would be to a prehistoric fossil.

The photo is created in a moment using a "cheese slice" of light and the fossil requires millions of years in a geological sandwich press to come to us as it does. The photo, depending on technology, is either particles of silver nitrate on a medium like paper or it's... complicated to explain. The fossil is made of minerals.

Neither are any more than a delimited representation of the original thing. Both the photo and the fossil are dead, flat representations of things that only live in three-dimensions. They are each stripped of significant amounts of important information.  Through completely different means they have both been crushed flat.