Here in the Lake District, colour can be hard to find in the Jan-March depths of winter. So I thought it might be fun to explore the replacement of faded colours – like those found in last year’s grasses and ferns – with a colour treatment that was blatantly artificial, yet suggested hidden fire and life…

The grasses above are a good example of something that retains last year’s summer shapes, but whose shapes remain, leaving us with a form that defies the winter’s ravages, yet is pale.

The iPhone’s toolset, including the downloaded Google Snapseed App, is good at taking such a pale form and bestowing a richness that would have been hard to achieve using just the raw set of ‘sliders’ that come with the native tools to brighten, darken or increase contrast, for example.

Equipped with a test result, above, I set out to find other sympathetic subjects – all this while being dragged around by a decidedly unsympathetic collie…

An old overhanging oak, near the end of the lake at Newby Bridge, looked promising. I explored different captures and settled on the above framing, then used examples of the same settings – varied in two stages- in Snapseed as the previous ‘winter fire’ shot.

The final result, below, included a little ‘smoothing’, and had much more atmosphere than the raw shot. Armed with two successes, I went hunting…

I was looking for an artistic rather than a purist approach, and quite happy to entertain a high degree of distortion. The shot below had only one strip of old vegetation to be ‘lifted’ by the filtering. The contrast between this and the dark background still made it an effective photo.

The result is nowhere near photo-realistic, yet gives life to the ‘fire in winter’ idea.

And what follows are the best of the rest…

It’s a technique I enjoyed exploring. I will use it with other settings on future projects.

©Stephen Tanham 2023

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog