(no subject)

The Nature Conservancy's best nature photos of 2009

There are some very lovely photos there but, sadly, the prevalence of photo enhancement software has made me very skeptical of certain types of photos. Ones like the first runner up, the one of Mt Ranier, and some others looked fake to me, like the photographer has taken a genuine photo and tarted it up with computer enhancements. Maybe they didn't, but they look unreal to me, and knowing that people *can* fake up photos electronically that way makes it hard for me to credit that they really got shots like that legitimately.

a wonderful quote

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the STANDING STONE or the DRUIDIC CIRCLE on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

--Robert Louis Stevenson, found at "How Books Got Their Titles"