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Description
I wasn't sure how I was going to achieve this effect, but when I saw this beautiful ghost gum, with its already stark white branches, I knew I wanted as almost abstract image, with the branches making their lovely natural lines.

After a bit of extreme, unsubtle processing in Lightroom, I got what I wanted. Once I got it into B&W, it kind of fell into place: pull the blue all the way down, plus the green and yellow (to darken the leaves), make the blacks maximum black. Raise the whites and highlights to maximum, and bump up the orange a bit (yep, orange gives a white shade in B&W). There is a surprising amount of detail left in some places (especially the knot in the lower centre), but I'm pleased I could get that extreme contrast I was looking for.

Oh, the title is because it reminds me of the screen prints an old teacher of mine used to make from photographs - he's use an arc lamp to expose the negative onto a sensitised silk screen, to use to make the screened prints. This is very much the way the finished screen print looked. It's nice (hmm, maybe not quite the right word) for a change ...

Description
I wasn't sure how I was going to achieve this effect, but when I saw this beautiful ghost gum, with its already stark white branches, I knew I wanted as almost abstract image, with the branches making their lovely natural lines.

After a bit of extreme, unsubtle processing in Lightroom, I got what I wanted. Once I got it into B&W, it kind of fell into place: pull the blue all the way down, plus the green and yellow (to darken the leaves), make the blacks maximum black. Raise the whites and highlights to maximum, and bump up the orange a bit (yep, orange gives a white shade in B&W). There is a surprising amount of detail left in some places (especially the knot in the lower centre), but I'm pleased I could get that extreme contrast I was looking for.

Oh, the title is because it reminds me of the screen prints an old teacher of mine used to make from photographs - he's use an arc lamp to expose the negative onto a sensitised silk screen, to use to make the screened prints. This is very much the way the finished screen print looked. It's nice (hmm, maybe not quite the right word) for a change ...