Ethereal Tree

Or how I made something I stumbled across by night into something more interesting

I like to walk, in fact sometimes I actually need to walk. A few weeks ago I couldn’t sleep and went for a walk round our town at 2AM which was very pleasant and after which I slept like a log. But on this walk I came across a tree with interesting bark, interestingly lit by a street light, which really caught my eye but for once I hadn’t bought my phone with me. I knew there was no point in trying to photograph anything other than very late because it’s a busy road and I didn’t want car headlights in it. So I squirrelled it away for future reference. Last night, came onto bedtime and I realised that I’d been indoors all day and that I was going to need to put a couple of kilometres under my belt otherwise I wasn’t going to sleep, I remembered the tree and thought I’ll go that way round and take my phone this time and see what I could do. Conditions were right, the street light was on, there was almost no traffic so took the photo and wandered on.

This morning, post coffee and breakfast, I downloaded it onto the computer to see what I could do with it. No offence to phone photo apps for editing, I’ve got them and use them, but I prefer if possible to do it on the big screen with photoshop (the ‘big screen’ may be the clue here, I’m 64 and need glasses….). My images that I share in various places like Flickr and Instagram are all monochrome, so the first thing I always do is to put a black and white adjustment layer on and see how it looks, because if that doesn’t work it’s not worth continuing, then I do a curves layer under that and tweak that and then see how it looks. It was interesting and I could have stopped there, but somehow, it wasn’t, well there if you catch my drift. I always say that my main inspiration is Scandinavian crime drama and I like people to think there’s a body just waiting to be stumbled across in my images, so I wanted a bit of something more moody, it was all a bit sharp.

I’ve got a lot of texture files I either got from Photoshop magazines back when there were actual magazines, with cover disks, or which I’ve taken, so I found one which looks like it might originally have been something like discolouration on metal or some such, stuck it on as a layer and played about with the blend modes and then all of a sudden I got this strange, slightly foggy effect happening, and I realised that was what I wanted. Bit of layer masking and so forth and it was there. I added some noise to it because, well I’m a film photographer at heart and I do like a sense of grain.

So for me the take home from this was that it’s worth pushing things a bit, with photoshop you can always undo it, and to experiment. Try different blend modes, try different opacities, try stuff. Because while it might be total horse pucky...it might be worth sticking with.