photo: slave to convention

I’ve been reflecting a bit about the process of taking photos and what I end up doing with them. The photo above was taken on the last day of the year, December 31st, on Inch Strand, Co. Kerry on a blustery, miserable day with bad light and a strong wind. I like the picture but all of a sudden I’m wracked by guilt (wracked I tell you 🙂 ) by the amount of underhandedness it contains. First off, the original image (below) is incredibly flat and uninteresting, so I messed it round a bit in my photo editor of choice, and because I’m slightly a mathematician and therefore fan of the Golden Section, I’ve cropped the image above to conform to that. Secondly, and this is way more underhand, I repositioned the horses and riders to adhere to the Rule of Thirds. You can see that I’ve moved the riders relative to each other.

Being also a fan of TV, an industry close to my heart, I’m beginning to draw an analogy between the underhandedness here and the smash hit TV series FlashForward, what if the manipulation I made in my photo editor actually happened in Real Life? The space-time continuum would be rightly Shanghai’ed. We’d all be screwed I tell you, missing metres and seconds out of our lives, without the lovely FBI Special Agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fffffiennes) and Dr. Olivia Benford (Sonya Walger) to save us. Ponder on it.