You Svengali!

I am by no means an excellent photographer.  Now, that doesn't mean that I didn't have ambitions to become one;  during the course of my travels I thought that why yes, yes I would become a great war photographer, Nachtweyan in my ability to move emotions through my lenscraft (wait, I think that actually means that I can sell retail eyewear for a low price).  Like many of us, I even fancied up my gear, cameraed up (is that a word or saying?  You know, like you better man up, cowboy up, lawyer up, camera up?) and bought myself one of those digital SLR cameras that everyone seems to have and knows how to use nowadays.

But like a lot of my pretensions to geekiness (and there are a lot of them, things that I always assumed that nerds knew how to do and that I therefore ought to learn how to do as well.  Take comic book collecting, for example:  classic nerd convention, right?  Well, I got through about ten issues of "Space Beaver" - no joke, not a porn, sitting on my shelf right now - before I got bored of it.  Or "Dungeons and Dragons" - I bought a bunch of the books, a couple of dodecahedrons, and then thought that having to do math to figure out if I killed an orc was boooooooring.  I treat geekiness like other kids treat learning how to play tennis or the guitar) learning how to take photos kinda fell to the wayside, and now I just have a big fancy camera that takes better pictures than I am a photographer.  But that's not the magic part.

Today my wife and I went to Seal Beach for the first time, and of course I bring along the camera so I don't feel like I've totally wasted my money on yet another hobby that's gone nowhere.  Lovely day out, etc. etc., but when we got home and put the pictures up on iPhoto (yup, the Apple program - the fact that I'm using iPhoto, not Photoshop or even Aperture, should tell you what a rank amateur I am) I noticed a little fleck, a little blemish on many of the shots.  Nothing huge like, say, a pigeon tapping on the screen or a spider crossing the background, but just a speck big enough to notice and irritate.

After reading through the manual (I find that I often read manuals - just not a dude in that respect) I figured out how to dust off the filter or something or other and managed to fix that situation, but I still had a bunch of pictures with a blemish on them, when I discovered the Retouch feature on iPhoto.

Retouch - sounds about right.  What happens is that if you do find a blemish on your pictures you can use this little editing feature of iPhoto to basically make the thing vanish - it blends that part of the picture all together, a little iPhotoshopping of your picture - magic!  But creepy, like David Blaine.  I'd heard of these programs that can totally alter your photos, you can even edit entire people out of them, and I started getting really weirded out - aren't you supposed to have hard evidence when it's photographic?  What in the world do we rely on?  What if there is no objective reality (by the way, there ain't) (sort of)?  What if there's a Retouch Abs function on iPhoto, and I totally can look like I have a six-pack?

Anyway, nice day today:

Treadmill

5.10 mi.  45 min.  8:49 pace.