Looking good

My 6 year old granddaughter donned her new angel dress, looked in the mirror and, in a loud voice proclaimed, “I look so good”. I couldn’t disagree – even with the remnants of dinner on her face.

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Spring Flowers

From the garden:

Early Spring in Port Stanley

A weekend away at Port Stanley: great weather; no Internet; books; music; walking and wet dog – what more could one ask.

A spring visitor

A blue jay in our garden this morning:

The natural

I was taking some photos for a daycare promotion today. All the kids were cute, but I’m predicting this one will have a career in modelling:

California Dreaming

Winter has finally arrived in Southern Ontario:

Autumn in Oakville

Most of the leaves have fallen, but the ground is colourful:

More here.

Photographic fantasy

William Blake wrote:

This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through the eye.

And Malcolm Muggeridge much later:

The first time that I ever went on a colour television filming expedition, I noticed that a member of the camera crew was carrying something rolled up under his arm. When I asked him what it was, he told me it was the plastic grass, real grass not being green enough for living colour. ‘Keep the witch hazel handy,’ a floor manager was instructed during the filming of a Nixon commercial during the 1972 Presidential election, ‘we can’t do the sincerity bit if he’s sweating.’ Cinema verite or cinema falsite? Not only can the camera lie, it always lies.

It’s worth noting that this revelation didn’t prevent Muggeridge appearing in front of the purveyor of lies at every paying opportunity.

So it comes as no surprise whatsoever to discover that an iconic war photograph is a fake.

If, as Muggeridge noticed, the camera always lies, what can we say about the digital photograph, compared to which silver halide is a model of veracity? Not much, perhaps, since we expect a digital photograph to be substantively bogus. That does not mean it can’t be a thing of beauty: