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21 July 2016
We had just been fooling around, really. Walking around the house with the iPhone 6 Plus, trying to find a few stock shots. These lips have always seem particularly well drawn to us but we usually shoot them straight on. This time we took an angle on them.
We opened the JPEG in Photoshop CC. Being able to throw some Raw editing tools at it helped immensely. We were able to sharpen it up quite a bit and shift the color to a cooler highlight with a rosey tint. We cleaned up some blemishes (if a mask can be said to have blemishes) with the Healing Brush.
We just needed a headline to go with it.
So we turned to a poem by Ezra Pound called Cino. Pound tells us Cino is speaking these lines on the road in Italy, sometime in 1309 (when life was simpler):
Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes.
It's the life of a troubadour. He elaborates:
Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,
Strange spells of old deity,
Ravens, nights, allurement:
And they are not;
Having become the souls of song.Cino, well, he will say anything. And he knows a lot of songs. All of them, it seems. He has sung women in three cities, he tells us. It's all the same. They are nothing to him but a new song to sing.
I have sung women in three cities.
But it is all one.And, you know, after he gets what he wants, he slips away before dawn -- while his conquest is still dreaming. Always.
Lips -- and the night goes. Tonight especially.