On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 03:48:27PM +0200, Toine pscripsit: > 2009/4/24 Graydon <[email protected]>: > > On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 03:29:43PM +0200, Toine scripsit: > >> An old Oak tree in spring: > >> http://tinyurl.com/dd6hr7 [snip] > > That's pretty and clever and well-executed, but it looks nothing like a > > living tree to me, which makes me like it less than I would if it looked > > like a tree. [snip] > Hmm That's interesting. My wife claimed it would fit on a funeral card > which isn't what I was looking for.
Well... There's this brief -- usually only a day for each species of tree where I live -- when the new leaves are visibly _new_; a paler, more translucent colour, unworn, and somehow shining with newness. Catch that in a sunny evening or morning and it's magical. So far as I can tell from the desaturated version, you have caught that moment or something very much like it; the tree has just come into full leaf, the angle of the sun is low, everything is shining. (Shining around some quite splendid bark textures on the shiny side of the tree, even.) But because that image is so strongly associated with greenness, and indeed one very specific once-a-year greenness, taking the green out of the image breaks the association with all those springtimes and makes it an image of complex light and shadow, rather than an image of a leafing tree. (Which is not to say that my conscious mind can't figure out it's a tree! A botanist wouldn't have much trouble getting species from this picture. The break is with the existing emotional associations with spring and trees.) That might be -- could well be! -- precisely what you want. If you want it to look like spring, though, I think you need to put the green in it. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
