This one is the background on my iPhone, which is as we all know the new benchmark for things you like. Getting this picture to balance out took forever. It took some fancy dodge tool fashioning to get the water and sky to be happy together. Then I burnt a big hole right in front of that radio tower in my texture negative by mistake, which would leave one of those black spots in front of it, which would suck. There was a ton of going back and forth to get it to how I like it.
I like my pictures offer an almost endless supply of little discoveries to come upon. Although I have a pretty good idea of what my pictures might look like while I'm making them, there is no way for me to really know. The details that I add to the picture while I'm adding them are too small for the eye to see, or are subject to change while drying. So when I print an image, blowing up the effects, that's when you and I and the WWW are able to see the tiny details.
The fact of the matter is I'm probably just a photo geek, and seeing grains of paint pigment magnified only excites me. I can accept this, and to move on I'll look back at this photo by Robert Howlett (b. 1831, currently dead).
This is a picture of the construction of the "Great Eastern" from 1857. What's it got to do with my picture? Nothing really, there's a boat in both, and that background has a funky shape in it kinda like mine. Howlett was a documentary photographer, assigned to record the building of this ship. His photographs raised the issue of when documenting an object whether or not to shoot the entire object, or to crop in and shoot only the pertinent information. Like in this one!
Or so I think, my photo history might be a bit rusty. Either way, you shouldn't need a reason to look at an old photograph.