Mirrors & Sunsets

I haven't been using my digicam/compact (can we please make it a thing to call digital cameras digicams?) for anything but specific projects lately so it's been a while since I've done a nice images-from-my-life post. I always find it a little weird how cyclical my ideas are. I mean, how I forget about how I like doing a certain kind of thing, and then I cycle back to it one day out of the blue, like finding an old memory under a rock. I guess that's how brains work though, everything is under a little rock somewhere in there.

Anyway, so this is a mixture of compact and phone pictures. As part of my current focus on the subject of distortion and perception and alteration and all that good stuff, I've been studying mirror images and taking a lot of mirror selfies. I really like thinking about the effect mirrors have on us, and that whole thing about only ever seeing mirror images of yourself. I am into mirror selfies generally anyway, because it gives me the distance to take a clear shot of myself. Holding a camera out to take a photo of yourself tends to warp you to some extent via the proximity of the camera to you, so it's tough to get a good representation of what you look like that way, but mirror selfies allow you to get it right (albeit a flipped version of how you actually look in person).

I focus on my own image pretty constantly. I don't consider it vain because I am the primary physical body through which I see humanity. I am a pocket of humanity all to myself, and I think it's perfectly normal to be interested in your own psychology and physiology. I care about myself a lot, intellectually, physically, and otherwise. I care about and am interested in other people in a similar way, but the person who I have the most access to is obviously myself. Looking at yourself and recording your own image is not de facto vanity but curiosity, experience, tactility, whatever.

In a similar way I also like to record my surroundings, my immediate environment, my collected objects, and objects that are giving me a particular sort of feeling at a particular time (did you know I really like the word 'particular'?). I'm very into holistic philosophies - there's a little of the whole world somehow in everything. 

Also: I took pictures of the sunset one day last week. I can't believe there's a beautiful sunset every day. That's pretty cool. Shout out to the solar system for that one.