Often while visiting desert locations I come across worn and weathered trees. Their tangled and distressed branches fascinate me. “Some day I’ll do something with this” would always be my thought as I snapped an image or two.

Well “someday” came recently resulting in the portfolio I have simply called Trees. 

My first attempt working on these images resulted that had too much orange, so I needed to do something that would create separation between the subject of each image and the surrounding landscape. I experimented with blackening the soil on a couple of the images.  Perhaps because it was around Halloween when I worked on these images I decided to carry this effect throughout the collection.

The black soil was produced by creating a layer where the red and yellow channels were desaturated and darkened, then applying a layer mask that hid most of this new layer except for the soil area.