Month: November 2008

Trees in Soldiers Field, Leeds

Often, photographers try to make an image that shows the scene as near as possible to how it appeared to them at the time. Of course scenes change with light and weather, but here, in the image below, I didn’t try to reproduce the scene as it appeared to me.

Instead, I reduced the image to black and white tones, lightened the yellow wavelengths, darkened the green wavelengths and overlaid the image with a slightly warm blue tone to produce the finished image.

This tree is growing on a raised bank about twenty feet back from the roadside, overlooking Soldiers Field in Leeds, England, and the leaves were yellow in the pale Autumn sunlight.

Shooting from the roadside below, only the sky could be seen, making for a simple image. But in my mind’s eye I could see the tree covered in hoar frost, as it might be in the coming months, and that is how I developed the image.

Soldiers Field, where this was shot, got its name from the assemblies of soldiers who gathered there before being sent to the trenches in the First World War. Today the ‘Field’ is bisected by the road and so Soldiers Field is really two fields, grass covered and very big. It is not difficult to imagine soldiers and bands and civilians congregating there.

tree_in_blue