Cannon Heath Down (5)

The 23rd of September was a gloriously sunny day, and it yielded this, the fifth of my paintings of Cannon Heath Down. I positioned myself a little lower down the hill I was sitting on this time; this is evident from the fact that you can't see all of the stands of trees that were visible in previous views.

The autumn is setting in now; you can see that in the wonderful colours of the trees. Of course, what you can see isn't the true colours of the painting (let alone those of the trees), because there is so much technology between your eyes and the canvas. First of all, you have to contend with the rather idiosyncratic colour balance of my digital camera (an inexpensive point and shoot model). The camera applied a ghastly blue cast to this image of the painting for some reason known best to itself. It needed fixing. To start with, I applied an auto white balance using Corel Photobook (an Adobe Photoshop analogue). That seemed to overcompensate, making the trees garishly orange. I tried again, fiddling with the colour balance manually, and this is my best attempt. After that, of course, the colours get mashed around by the screen settings of the computer you're using to view the image.

Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm