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They're a technology, those mules and that horse. I came to visit that technology, more ancient than the Phonecians, in a car. I captured their image electronically in a digital code. And I transferred it into two or three software applications for post production on my Mac. And the fact that we muddle all of that together into a final image to glow your monitor thousands of miles from where I'm sitting, and maybe dozens of years afterward... That is so ordinary that we are no more impressed by it than we are of the mud that forms after a rain. We have reached an age where it no longer makes sense to wonder how things work, but only how to work them to our advantage.
We simply don't care what makes a tool function, but how to function something with the tool. This is a very large change. In the living memory of thirty percent of the living population things worked just the opposite way. I am staring right now at letters formed by electricity. How does it get here? Where does it come from? What is it? Hey, that's all behind the curtain offstage. I just want to be able to grab enough to form these letters to write about something completely different. To write about three mules and a horse. Which may or may not have looked anything like the way they look here when I saw them through my lens down in Blue Ball.
They say that a concert pianist should never think about the mechanics of playing when she is performing. Because if she pays to much attention to the act, what she is performing will come apart. See how that works? By examining the way those animals form the image up above... we totally lose sight of the animals. I wonder how often folks fail to accomplish something because they become immersed in the process of doing it? The critics of art photography are a lot like that. They become caught in the details of composition, color, form, shape, and texture. Or they focus upon lighting, focus, apertutre, cropping, or exposure... and they miss what the image means. Process again trumps accomplishment, understanding, success.
Life lessons?