Something caught my eye at last evening's sunset. There was a line of clouds that looked like a zipper. The setting sun projected shadows upwards from the zipper. These shadows are not as distinct in the photo as in real life, despite all the software tricks that I tried.
Despite being a bit of a failure, it was still a noble effort. We live at a interesting point in history; over the last couple years the ubiquity of digital cameras and photo software has rendered the beauty of sunrise and sunsets obsolete. Not to the naked eye of course. When most people say that a sunset is "breathtakingly beautiful" (groan), don't they really just mean that it was very red or pink or orange?
Very? Who cares any more!? You can just click a couple things in the software to cause the colors to blow the eyeballs right out of your head, and if that's too much trouble, just rotate the dial on the camera to its "sunset" setting.
Just think how many generations of our species have enjoyed colorful sunsets. How far back into the prehistory of our species would you have to go before the eyes, the optic nerve, and visual cortex were different than ours today? Are we just going to complacently allow all of this to be wiped out in a couple years by the Evil Chip?!
Ironic isn't it? The main effect of "Progress" is to cause "More" to become boring. If this effect is general, why do we act like Progress is so important? If Progress is a farce, then what's left of our mighty civilization?
There is a third choice. What if we de-emphasized color in sunsets and switched our loyalty over to shapes? It certainly is easy to appreciate the shapes of desert plants, grasslands, rocky topographies, hoar frost, curved bill thrashers, etc. So why not clouds?
Comments
We are addicted to reading fiction in a similar fashion to tweeking the actual photo into something else. Fiction is based on the real but then the real gets tweeked.
So the question remains, why do we even WANT to tweek the real, either photo or human happenings?
Maybe it's just the result of human imagination which is the basis of creativity. We take the real, we stretch it here and there, and we have something new.
It's fun. It's intriguing. It's addicting. And maybe it helps us understand ourselves a bit since it helps us see the humor, the atrocity, the good and the evil in what is real.
At any rate, that's my take on it but going back to your photos for a second as compared to being there and seeing the sky, the sunset, the clouds, etc. for myself.........well, there's more than what just meets the eye when you are really there. It's the feel of the air, the warmth or coolness on the skin, the humidity or lack of it on the senses, etc.
When I muse here about past memories, it's never a photo that I recall, tweeked or otherwise.
The comment about shapes reminds me of the old rorschach inkblot test.......a projective technique. What do you "see" in the shapes? When I was a kid, I loved to lay in the grass and watch the clouds and look for shapes. I thought there was a message there for me.
LOL
Still, I can't shake the analogy of comparing camera or software tricks to a woman (who isn't all that pretty) globbing on too much makeup.
I guess you're right about colors affecting emotion, for many people, particularly 51% of the population. Personally I am rather indifferent to color.
She is tweeking nature to create an effect. She emphasizes her eyes, so a male will want to gaze deeply into them to see her soul, or she emphasizes her lips or her hips or her legs, etc.
She wants the male of the species to notice her, so that her field of potential mates is broadened.