I found some photographs from six years ago that I hadn't put together and thought it was about time to do something with them.

This is an unsuspecting tree in Florida. There is always a top and a bottom with a tree and this one happily has those two areas well designated with the arabesque of the upper foliage and the trunk that looks like elephant hide.

The black and white was a satisfying choice for me as it allowed the pattern and the texture to be forefront rather than all that colour. I took it through Photoshop CC's High Dynamic Range setting to punch up the contrast and the prickly quality of all of the surfaces. The detail below shows how it gives an unearthly sheen to skin tone. That unsettling tone is not quite disturbing. It is an image of an incident that is vague in my memory now, even less than my memories of climbing trees myself when I was a kid. It should be a different world: it is subject appropriate.

If you look carefully you can see where I filled certain areas by pasting and flipping elements then disguising the merge.