Why be happy with what you’ve got…
when you can have more, more, MORE?

Those lyrics from a Pinocchio presentation made such an impression on me years ago that they are firmly entrenched in my mind. Apparently, I’ve lost all related details because now I can’t find any connection online between the lyrics and Pinocchio. Did I dream this up?

Pinocchio is a cautionary tale about over-desiring and overdoing. What brought the lyrics to mind was how easy and inexpensive it is to modify photographs these days.

Photographically, our creativity enjoys ever wider bounds of expression. We can turn bright flowers pale and vice versa. We can change pink roses to blue… or purple or turquoise. We can give them a rainbow glow, sharpen or soften them, stretch or skew them, and so forth.

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“The Science of Healing Places.” That topic was brought to my attention tonight when someone shared a website link to an article. Its accompanying photograph was obviously enhanced. It showed a manicured (almost manufactured) outdoor landscape in shades of electric green. Had there been any “flaws” in the landscape, I’m sure those would have been edited out. The unnaturalness of the scene was disturbing to me; it depicted a place I would definitely not have found healing. At the very least, it made me appreciate Nature’s irregularities, surprises, and trademark balance of profusion and restraint.

[Now my mind has gone off on a tangent—designing a logo for Mother Nature. I’ll call it back.]

Anyway, I, too have been making enhancements to the photos I take. Sometimes I crop, so as to focus on a subject or get a satisfying artistic balance of components. Sometimes I brighten or darken, or make the colors more or less intense, usually to make the photo correspond better to my remembrance of how things looked when I snapped the shot.

Tonight, I experimented with several photos from yesterday’s walk to the lake. (They illustrate this blog post.) The gray-toned hazy sunset photo has merely been cropped. The blue-toned lake scene has been cropped and recolored. The photo of iris leaves is shown in original and modified versions. I like them all—

I’m learning to be happy with what I’ve got… and with more, more, MORE!  ♥ ~Jo

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Photo Credits: All by Jo Lightfoot.