Photos from a late night winter walk...

Last night, in -17C wind chill, I walked some of my dog's favourite routes - a fairly large off-leash park with small hills, a school that's deserted late on winter nights, and took photos with my iPhone.

When I came home, I played in Photoshop. What new aspects to the shot can appear with various filters and colour manipulation intrigues me, and often triggers poetic response.

I offer more-or-less 'before' (with a little license since the originals were dark and grainy) with 'after.' All images evoke their own stories. Click on each for larger versions.

Of the two above, the one on the left looks like an empty, closed building late at night. The same image manipulated makes it seems alive, perhaps the location of a party event, or at least some kind of prophetic vision happening in the night.

The two images of the tree by the road, its boughs lined with snow, a tiny waning crescent of a moon in the sky, surprised me. Firstly, how the snow looks like a river flowing by the tree with the shadow of the trunk appearing as if a reflection in flowing icy water, and then the green and blue image which fit strangely to my image for River of Stones yesterday. What amazed me, working in the midnight air at my computer, was that the tree, though bare in winter nakedness, with different colour manipulations suddenly bloomed as if in richer seasons of leaf.

Stone #9

...it was a dawn of phosphorescent algae, coming in from the ocean, drifting overland,


a green sun
hung in icicles.

_

[I wrote the image early morning, and late at night, during a frigid -16C wind chill dog walk, took this photo with my iPhone - it's photoshopped, and I'll show the original in another post- but how strange... is floating green phosphorescence a presence... in my images, and photos...? I do like how the photo turned out but couldn't tell you what I did to create it in the shades you see here.]

A River
of Stones

                                          

Stone #8

like white fruit drifting from the sky, like a swirl of cold blossoms that hide patches of hardened blackberry ice

_
[some of the crystals of snow falling were huge, clumped together, like chunks of coconut, reminding me of falling white fruit, and the second image of a swirl of cold blossoms should have come first, blossoms before fruit, but that's not how the image composed itself and I had no energy to resist with insistence on some modicum of poetic logic - but I had already fallen in love with the image 'blackberry snow' -no idea where it came from- how freshly falling billowy snow tastes to my synaesthetic seeing... later in the day I was able to re-assert some poetic order to the image and called it properly 'blackberry ice' referring to the black ice on which we can slip, skid, fall, tumble...

the image sounds like a fancy fruity cocktail? I wish...]

A River
of Stones

                                          

Stone #7

A bath lit by flame. Candles whisper at the edges of the water. And a singer whose song arises from the caves of the earth rising up through the steam.

_
[A host of candles. Tealights placed around the edge of the bath. Lisa Gerrard's The Silver Tree (scroll down to find it).]

A River
of Stones