Awe and Instagram

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I called this blog Beauty and Madness because I intended to write not just about politics and academics, but also about art, as the mood struck. The mood has struck.

I went for a four-hour walk and took a lot of pictures with my phone. I posted them via social media by way of Instagram. As is my habit, I made liberal use of Instagram's photo-editing features before posting - not the preset filters, but the custom tools, the sliders and so forth. I liked the results but, as usual, I felt a little guilty about the manipulation.

This got me thinking. Not only do the shots look a lot better with the touch-up, but I feel that they capture what I am seeing better than the untouched photo. They make visible in reproduction the details and impacts that caused me to take the picture in the first place. What's going on here?