Laura's Coffee

I really like this photo of my wife. It's highly manipulated (post-processed is the phrase photographers use), but that's in line with a lot of my photographs. Almost everyone uses post-processing to a degree: cropping, adjusting the contrast or brightness, re-sizing the image.

Owen Barfield briefly mentioned abstract and surrealist art in his book Saving the Appearances, in the context of the role of imagination in human perception. He says that imagination - he uses the word with a fairly narrow and technical meaning - plays an important role even in normal, everyday seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling and tasting. As that imagination is consciously exercised in surreal and abstract art, then, it implies that the artist actually sees the world in that way. And the point of his book is to say that the conscious use of human imagination will more and more fashion our everyday world.