When I photographed these yellow tulips recently, I saw that the camera hadn’t accurately recorded what I was actually seeing. The colours looked diluted and dull.

To compensate for that Image, I used the cell phone camera functions of saturation and black point to bring up the yellow of the flowers I was seeing at the time, even though this did ‘enhance’ and ‘dramatize’ the other colours more than they were.

So, this photo is a composition of ‘my truth in focus’ and a bit of ‘pleasing background drama’ you might say.

Hmmm… Is this what could be called ‘Photo Psychology‘?? Is there such a thing? Is this what Artistic Photographers intuitively know or just my Imagination, my ‘Image-in-action’?

The word ‘just’ here denies the validity and importance of the Imagination as a way of perceiving things differently than ‘normal’ consciousness.

This leads me to remember a Dream I experienced when young. I left my normal, ordinary Reality and stepped into a wondrous pastoral landscape of quiet beauty and peaceful happiness. The colours were much more vivid and vibrant, more vitality ‘alive’, more pleasantly ‘dramatic’ than the everyday, normal, denser, heavier world we live in.

When I awoke, my mind had to adjust back to what my eyes were seeing around me.

I’ve held that memory throughout my life. Even the brightest, deepest and most vivid colours here cannot compare.

January 18, 2021

Shelley Wilson