Playing with bare trees

One of the things that I like to photograph at this time of year is bare trees silhouetted against the sky.  With the strong winds we have been having recently there are plenty of trees that have lost all of their leaves – the trick is capturing them when there is a blue sky behind!

For Photo art Friday we were encouraged to experiment again so I played with some of my bare tree photos.

Here I used the invert filter again – to turn the tree white.  Then I added Bonnie’s wicked texture on vivid light and got this spooky image that I think looks as if it is bathed in very strong moonlight

Next was a photo I took in town of the trees and monuments on top of a hill

I started by using a Pioneer Woman action to turn it to black and white so as to dramatise the silhouettes.  Then I added some textures and stumbled upon an interesting effect.  There are several layers that create the action effect and I accidently put the texture between these layers and discovered that it produces an interesting muted effect.  I will definitely play with this discovery some more.  The textures here are Bonnie’s Old Master dust and unconditional – both on colour burn.

And finally I used a tree silhouette to apply the polar coordinates distort filter which I saw applied in something I read over the summer (sorry can’t remember where).  Ever since I saw it I have been trying the effect of different photos because getting the right photo to use makes all the difference to the result.  This is amongst the best I’ve created.  It reminds me of one of the illustrations in the book The Little Prince.

I’ll be taking more photos of bare trees this month so that I can create some more dramatic photo art with them.  Are you a fan of photographing bare trees?