This image was captured on the east end of Lac Leman in Switzerland. I had spent eight years in Geneva but never really took the time to visit the country. Only after I had left for Los Angeles did I really start to take interest in the visiting my once and perhaps future home. I was driving around Lac Leman on a very brisk late December morning when I saw this tree stick out from the water. It was a tree, all alone that somehow found a way to grow out of the lake, as in exile from the forest. There was something powerful about it, it was standing there, almost willfully defying the laws of nature. I wonder to this day, how it came to grow there.

I captured the this particular image using an infrared camera. The infrared process allows me to capture light that is invisible to the human eye and then to re-transpose the colors into the visible spectrum so that we can see the unseen. The shot was taken in the middle of the day with a very strong infrared light component from the sun making the tree shine brightly, though we would not know if we saw it with the naked eye. Part of the infrared process is choosing what colors should the infrared spectrum be transposed to. Here I chose a golden hue for the tree and chose to desaturate the fore and background, manually cutting around each leaf to ensure a seamless composition. This strong contrast between the tree and its surrounding elements was done to highlight what I first felt when seeing this tree, that it was an outlier and deserved to stand out when represented through a photograph.

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