Clarity

West Alton, Missouri
Photograph by Tom Atwood

"God has given you one face," Hamlet says to Ophelia, "and you have given yourselves another." Like Ophelia and her friends, this photo is wearing some makeup, too. God has given my camera a lovely image of these small islands where eagles roost in Ellis Bay, and I have put makeup on it. To be specific, I have added saturation (using the processing software Lightroom 2), and I desaturated the color blue, to bring out the snow on the islands' shores. The main "makeup" I have applied, though, is a dramatic reduction in the "clarity" of the image, which fuzzes it up a bit, giving the image a slightly dreamier quality than God did. Shutter: 1/60; Aperture: f/5.6; ISO: 100; Focal length: 18 mm