I love taking photos of nature and architecture. My dad would take photos during every trip our family went on; sometimes they would include us. After the trip, he'd be in his office reviewing the details on his monitor, stressing about balancing the shadows and colors. At first, I didn't understand: the photos always looked great on the display. He'd stretch their pigments and tones, as if searching for something.
On a different occasion it clicked when I witnessed him battling his Brother printer. I would print out my school assignments on a HP printer, sometimes in color for diagrams for science courses, but I would never see a printer behave like his before. The Brother printer would do one ink layer at a time, maneuvering the paper on a conveyor. "shriiiek--rat-rat-rat-rat-rat-rat" lurching the paper out onto the tray with so-so precision. "sssht.. sssht.. sssht.. sssht.. sssht.." the jet head would swipe back and forth, adding strips of yellow, then magenta, then cyan, and lastly black.
My father always had an eye for quality in product manufacturing: he'd examine the setting of the layers carefully to make sure they were neat, even, and level. His Brother printer, which printed on a high-gloss paper, would place 4 distinct layers of color to eventually form the image. Sometimes he'd stop it midway because the colors, like a bad lithograph, would collide against each other and make echos of an image. He'd pop open the body and carefully note the alignment of the ink wells and their associated heads. Once he was satisfied, which could take upwards of days, he would proudly frame it to be displayed in the house.
Nowadays, there are less printed pictures and more virtual pictures. The curation and publishing of your photos is still full of reflection. It's a door into another world, showing someone that you thought there was something special, something interesting. Sometimes that can be an ordinary object but for a moment you see beyond it.
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