Thursday, May 13, 2010

Photoshop and the death of imperfection

We all long for perfection.  They human eye, from birth, seeks symmetry, and contrast.  The long written about, never obtained state of nirvana.  Call it what you like.  We long for things to be as we imagine them in our mind.  I'm guilty myself.  Lots of the photos I post here have been, well, tweaked.  I amp up the saturation or contrast, or make it a bit warmer.  I try to make the photo show what I remember when I took the picture.  But a crappy old digital camera can never capture what I see in my head, for a camera cannot dream, or imagine.  It simply measures the light that will come in through the lens and records the image accordingly.

But what has the 'tweaking' created?  I see images and I no longer trust that they are real.  I assume perfection has been created on someone's computer.  I also have become so used to seeing images without blemish that an awkward photo is painful to the eye.  I delete every blurry or bad photo of me and my family and all that gets recorded is the beautiful.  There are benefits to this, of course.  You never see a picture of me where I have not done my best to hide that double chin and that 'days since my last shower cause the babe howls when I get behind the curtain' hairdo I'm sporting.

Pondering this today as I am unable to take pictures.  My camera has become stuck on a high exposure setting and everything is washed out.  I'm also pondering how often I scrub the image of myself that I present to others so they won't see my imperfections, not just photos, but words, facebook updates, ideas.  Food for thought.  By the way if I could take a picture of Cora right now, it would be amazing.  Seersucker top and pants, my black and white slouch purse over her arm and a purple safari hat from the Nashville Zoo.  My girl has style!

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