Honestly

Yesterday Bittersweet said, 'I turn that tree into a place that I like. Is it still a photo? It is not an honest one. I would love to know how to take an honest photo. Maybe I will go away and try to learn a bit more. I would miss you. But it might be good. Depends on time and the universe.'

and prompted some interesting comments including:

'You have shown us honestly how [it] looked to you, not [to] your camera's sensor.' Prime Mart

'Is it more honest when it looks like what you saw than when it looks like what you wanted to see?' Kendall

'Mess[ing] around with it ... is only putting a bit of yourself into the photograph, after all. What's not honest about that?' Nicky

'The way we choose to process an image is as, if not more valid than what the little computer chip in your camera decides. The image we choose to put in the frame isn't the whole truth, it's just the bit we choose to look at.' Mr John

'God what a fabulous image. Don't care what you did or didn't do.' Max01

So today I decided to experiment with truth. I took a photo looking up the trunk of a winter tree whose shapes I liked. I didn't like the dull off-white sky so I took a picture of the reflections in the door of a blue car across the road to put behind it. Then it looked rather boringly like a bluish sky behind a winter tree so I took a picture from underneath some scaffolding next to the tree. These three pictures (quickly blended using Photoshop layers in a way that could have been done in a darkroom) remind me of what I saw today and of what I was thinking, make me feel cold again even though I'm back indoors now, and show you a little about my aesthetics.

Incidentally, this is less processed than some of my other pictures here.