The stories told by trees

Lone tree in a puddle

I don’t know what sort of tree this is. I’ll have to wait until it’s in leaf for a clue. I see it once a week or so on my rambles across the plane, as I continue hiding out from Covid, so I’ll get to know it in all its seasons. While it wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, it has the distinction here of being alone, so it can be more expressive. It’s also a valuable way-marker through the confusion of drainage channels and boggy potato fields that make up this part of the world. And to top it all, there’s this puddle, shaped just right, that reflects it. I think it tells a lonely story.

There’s a school of thought among photographers that scorns the use of filters. They don’t like fancy post-processing techniques either. You should tell it like it is, they say. A skilled photographer doesn’t need software to make an impact. A skilled photographer reads the light, squeezes the shutter and bang. There’s your dinner! And fair enough, if that’s your thing. But there’s also a school of thought that says no two people will see a scene the same way. We always overlay it with our mood, with our imagination. The camera sees things one way, and we see it another. And if we want to bring what the camera sees closer to how we saw it, we use whatever pre and post-processing techniques there are to achieve that.

So, I shot this five times in rapid succession. The first image is correctly exposed, the others are under and overexposed to varying degrees. The underexposed ones exaggerate the texture of the sky. The overexposed ones bring the details out of the shadows. Then I used some free, open-source software on the computer called Luminance HDR. This overlays the images and lines them up for you, then adds some tone-mapping to bring out detail and colour. It also changes the mood of the scene, depending on the tone-mapping algorithm you use. This one is Mantiuk ’06. It adds a bit of noise, which I didn’t like at first, but now I do. Then I use RawTherapee, another free open sourced tool for cropping and fine-tuning. RawTherapee also seems to convert images well for displaying on a screen.

Bleak and wind-blasted. That’s how the scene appeared to me this weekend. A single, normally exposed, shot told a different story, but Luminance seemed to reach in and pull out that ragged lonesomeness for me, one that struck a chord with the times.

Given the turmoil at home and abroad, I should perhaps be paying more attention to current affairs than gawping at trees. But these days trees make more sense. To an old left-libertarian like me there’s much about our direction of travel that pains me. As a pragmatist though, I’m persuaded there’s not much we can do about it while the Zeitgeist is pointing so firmly in the other direction – meaning right-authoritarian. But since I’ve drifted onto the subject, are we English really expected to wrap ourselves in the Union Jack at a time when the Union has never been more precarious? Are we really to play the patriotic card at a time of spiralling food-bank use, a time when even cripplingly long hours of work are no guarantee of avoiding poverty? Are we to pretend that’s okay, a good example to trumpet on the world’s stage? And all that was before Covid, of course, and a response that has left so many dead, yet so many well-connected types in serious profit. I think my nameless wind-blasted tree, reflected in a muddy puddle, has more to say about where we are right now. Anyone wrapping themselves in the flag at a time like this is using a strange kind of reality-bending optic, and certainly one that stretches this photographer’s credulity way beyond reason.