On seeing what's there, and what isn't.

A couple of weeks ago, I was uploading pictures from my camera and frowning a little at how washed out they were. "You can fix that, you know," Daniel told me. He toggled the contrast and brightness levels in Microsoft Picture Viewer and suddenly my whole perception of the world changed. This is a little bit of an exaggeration. But this does reveal my unfortunate ignorance of the visual arts. Here I was thinking that my pictures always looked dull and unfinished because everyone else had a better camera than mine. Everyone else probably does have a better camera than I do, but I quickly discovered that I could at least make what I've got a lot more enjoyable to look at.

Monday of finals week, a group of friends and I got half-price Frappuccinos (greatest Starbucks promotion ever) and went down to the park in Liberty Station to do some studying. I spent about five minutes reading and then decided that any more effort wasn't going to significantly increase my performance on my test the next day. So I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures of whatever I saw. I heart macro settings a lot.

This is a lamppost, if you were wondering.

To demonstrate the radical difference just a little toggling can do, I have reproduced below two pictures of myself.

Before:

Here we have a nerdy girl taking self-timed pictures of herself in the park.

But with some photo editing, we have a really cool skirt and a magical world. Right? I do love that skirt. Angelica bought it at a thrift store but gave it to me because she thought it was too big on her. I thought it was too small on me until I tried it on again months later and it fit! I had to wear it. I had my Victorian lit final that day anyway. It just had to happen.

And below I am a guinea pig once again.

Before:

The original has a dismal industrial canal vibe, and I look like a seriously lost individual.

But with some contrast, and probably saturation and brightness or something, I can be lost in a technicolor wasteland. It's superb.

Altering my photos has an effect that is not unlike the sensation I had when I first put on my glasses (just about a year ago). Everything is clearer and brighter, and I am rediscovering details and images that I've been missing for so long.

I wondered briefly, after I discovered how this worked, whether changing my photos was on some level unethical, as if I were trying to alter reality. But I soon realized that my perception of cameras as capturing reality was faulty. Many (most) of my pictures don't look like what I see or what I am trying to portray. In a lot of cases, editing the photos actually creates an image that is closer to what I was perceiving and how I was perceiving it.

And some pictures, like this one, don't change too much even when I adjust the settings significantly. If anything, they just become a little more real.