The bad thing about finding a hair in your soup is not so much noticing the thing before you ever put the spoon in... that's easy enough to remedy. It's finding it after you have taken a few sips. Somehow, for me at least, this is worse. Much worse.
Why should it make any difference?
I guess finding the hair before I get started prepares me psychologically to indulge in the soup without further concern. I found a hair. I removed it. No big deal.
But, if I have some soup, then find a hair, its like my entire dining experience has been tainted or sullied in some way. It doesn't seem to matter that the soup is just the same no matter when I find the hair (or if I find it at all) or that the fix--prompt removal--is exactly the same in either case.
Which brings me to todays image. Despite its size, I never saw the hair as I was framing the shot. Then, as I began processing it, I had to decide if I should clone it out or leave it in.
One the one hand, this critters hair (a deer, an opossum, a squirrel or a skunk... I have no idea) is certainly a part of the outdoor environment in which the shot was taken. It's natural. On the other, it distracts (if only a little) from the main subject.
In the end I decided to leave it in. I had no moral quarrel with either option, but once I realized I could spin an entire post around this silly hair the choice was made.
Of course, the hair was in my picture... not in my soup. This made the decision to leave it alone a lot easier to swallow.
3 comments:
This is one of the issues with macro photography that always bothered me. I have very good eyesight, but those macro lenses are still better than my eyes at locating dust and other anomolies in a composition. I have since learned to look more closely than normal when shooting macro to find obvious things, but when the errant dust bunny rears its head after the fact, I'll often clone it out if it's not adding something intriguing to the photo...
LOL my first thought was ICK but it made sense to me as I read along. Then opened the image to see that mysterious hair !! LOL...fun non the less -
You know what they say Michael, "Hair today...."
You raise the question of trust. "Trust?" Uh-huh. We trust what we hear, smell, see, and taste is what we imagine it to be. Contradictions are startling. And Deb is right, the "ick!" factor is way up there among disconcerting startles Soup hairs are at least as annoying as soup insects (although it's not clear which is worse. To each his own, eh?)
Regardless, your image is again a window to find a nifty idea. Increasingly you are creating portals here that we can look at, go.."Ohhhhh" and then pass through to an idea or feeling on the other side. Your sort of illustrating thought. It sure keeps me coming back. Thanks a lot.
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