γ

Look familiar? I know, I posted this photo of my family cat previously. However, in the previous posting Kati was a silhouette.

To explain why you are seeing the same photo of Kati (the cat) again: I was fiddling with adobe gamma in attempt to get a rather dark movie I was watching to brighten up a bit so I could see what was going on. I cranked the gamma up a fair bit. Alas, the movie didn't get any brighter. But of course everything else my monitor was displaying did lighten up a fair bit. Whilst I was doing this I noticed that a photo I had been editing looked grossly flawed with the gamma turned up. So, fearing that all of my photos would look equally flawed to viewers who have their displays set to a similarly high gamma, I opened up my little blog here to have a look. To my relief, the photos all looked quite the same, just a bit lighter. But one of them (above) seemed to improve dramatically in this semi-washed-out state. Maybe I am just losing it, but I love the new aesthetic of the image and I don't just mean the details it reveals.

Perhaps the high contrast and vivid appearance that I have been shooting for all this time (insert pun cliché here) is not necessarily the zenith of photographic beauty.