#the warm and light green and angst/horror photos were edited by my handsome fiance ;)

[i-call-me-clarence]

Pictures of a Metaphor

Here is an image of a mushroom:

It’s interesting, it’s got okay composition, the mushroom’s obviously the focal point, but there’s other things that draw the eye in this scene too. There’s the dark red leaf in the upper lefthand corner that leads you away from the mushroom, to the pinecone, maybe you notice then, that there’s another pinecone to the very left, you might get drawn over to the green leaves in the upper right, before you’re coming back home to mushroom land. 

This is a story before it’s been edited. It’s complete, it has flow, beginning middle and end. A bit muted, a little lacking in that *pizzaz*, but not horrible.  

Some people are fine with this, the image above being exactly what they were going for. Tamed, real, raw. Others would be disappointed. After all that hard work of finding a subject, setting up the shot, and finally taking enough pictures to find a decent one, you’ve got… this, something that’s a bit too dull for some, or maybe just not what you were hoping for.  

Now what if you throw in a little color? Made it warmer, fluffier, gave it some more detail and definition? You might get something like this:

It’s got a completely different vibe! It’s something that might catch your attention, compel you to stare at it for a little while. It’s more fun, kind of vintage. 

But what if you were looking for something a bit more weird? Something with unexpected colors, something vibrant as hell that made you go ‘Wow’ like Owen Wilson? You might end up with something a little like this instead: 

The greens and reds almost clash but there’s a strange, unexpected harmony.  Intriguing blues and purples can be spotted throughout the image, if your eyes can focus long enough away from the vibrant greens and reds. It’s kinda bizarre. It makes you feel… something. 

But maybe weird isn’t what you want. Maybe warm things make you cringe. So you add in a little darkness, change the tone, create conflict and angst. Or maybe you simply want to unsettle someone. It could end up looking like this: 

Dark, cold, finding a mushroom out in the woods, near nightfall, you’re starving and don’t know if it’s poisonous or not. 

But what if that’s not enough? What if you want to take that dull old mushroom photo, and bring it to the far edge of reality and then push it off? What if you want to throw it into the very pit that the word ‘insanity’ drug itself out of? What if you want to find pandora’s jar (it was never a box it was a jar folks) and bust it open, just to see if maybe a few more horrors were left inside? In simple terms, what if you just wanna make people’s skin crawl and their eyes need some bleach?

…Unsettling, to say the least. 

All of these pictures, are the same exact picture, edited in different ways. What I’m trying to get across here, is that when the story’s done, on occasion, it’s really only just begun. My fiance’s first draft is his final project, and it’s a painstaking process, which he loathes every nano-second of. Me? I start strong with maybe something more like this: 

And end stronger with something like this old familiar bad boy:

(It’s the weird one. I’m trying to say I write weird shit)

But sometimes, you finish a story, first draft DONE, and then it’s just… kinda meh. It doesn’t even really seem worth the time to fix it… POLISH THAT SHIT! Edit it until it SHINES! Beauty is waiting, it just needs a little slap here, a comma there, maybe some italics, and then BAM! Masterpeice. (Remember, Leonardo Da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa for like ten thousand years, making little edits here and there. Don’t spend 10k years on it though, learn when to stop ((something you’d have to hold over Da Vinci’s head :D))

And if you need to get a story down, but are daunted by the task of taking the brutally agonzing steps of making it perfect on the first go round, then… Just don’t. Just take the dull picture with the good idea. Then edit the shit out of it until it looks like the image in your head. 

Don’t let a first draft become your last and end up in the recycle bin. Ideas are fire and passion. Don’t snuff them out just because building them up would take work.