this picture is one of my favorite examples of how editing can change a photo dramatically.
just a little tweak made this photo feel ethereal. looking at this, you might think that i had happened upon the right place and the right time. but more than the work of a lucky photographer, this was the work of a smart editor.
i feel a strange need to defend my edited photos. my generation has been raised on a belief that editing is bad. we've known the horrors of photoshop editing being used to reinforce our society's expectations of weight, height, body hair, etc...
but with photos, being insincere is not a bad thing. it's the wrong way to look at things. i think that we should celebrate things that make us feel good. photos that are shot and edited to make a certain thing BECOME true, even when it wasn't to begin with.
so i darken the environment proudly. i make the sun more golden proudly. i make my photos more pleasing to the eye proudly.
maybe no one thinks this is an issue to begin with. maybe this is confusing a lot of people. but i think that there are people out there, especially photographers, who think like this. this is my plea for people to love making photos look good, even when they weren't to begin with.
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