What Happens When A Picture Just Isn't Right

Sure, all the pictures that show up on web pages and blogs look great. That's because for everything picture that gets published, a couple hundred get deleted. Usually, I can look at a picture in the camera and know if it has any possibilities. So, by virtue of the fact that it remains in the camera, expectations have already arisen before it gets uploaded to the computer. After uploading, some additional deletes are made, so the expectations have risen considerably on every photo that has made two cuts. Most of them turn out fine, some good and others extraordinary. Rarely does one not turn out at all. The above picture is one of those. After playing with it for toooooo long, I was about to delete it, when those feelings kicked in about how it had survived multiple cuts, how it must have some virtue and why couldn't I do my job and fix it! After some more photoshopping, with no luck, the mind went a completely different direction. What if I solarized the picture? Hummm, that's not so bad. What if I turned it into a watercolor? Well, it's certainly better than anything else I could come up with, so the picture lives! John Williamson once told me if I didn't like a picture, do something crazy in photoshop and call it art. So, here's some "art." Funny enough, the next day I got an email from John to view one of his photos - it was a watercolorized photo of a sleigh. (http://cspics.smugmug.com/photos/243696405-L.jpg) It was pretty nice. I saw him the next day and commented how nice his watercolorized sleigh was compared to my chapel and that he did hiw for the right reasons, to create art, while I did mine for the wrong reasons - complete and total frustration. He laughed and informed me that frustration was the exact reason why he did his sleigh. It was still better than my chapel!