Essouira
Relaxing by the sea on Morocco's Atlantic coast.

The captions and the categories they imply are a bit misleading. The three groups correspond to our days in Essaouira. As it turned out, we spent our time out (and taking pictures) during the day, then at night and, on the last day, walking around the beach.

These pictures also differ from all the other pictures in that I used Photoshop on just about all the photos, where in the past I had fiddled with it occasionally. Why? Because I can, and because I consider it to be part of a developing process in the same way that exposure, developer, and fixer are for chemical-based photo finishing. In some sense, the verity of photographs as a "true" or trusted image of the thing photographed has been suspect for some time (I'm certain historians of science and photography have spilled much ink on this). With the advent of digital photography and digital photo manipulation software one should consider the trusted image notion dead. One need only recall the ensuing tempest when an Egyptologist dropped a dime on the National Geographic for slightly moving one of the Great Pyramids in a sunset cover shot. Certainly there have been times when I wanted to remove a power line or a stray tourist body part. I consider it my responsibility to not include those things from the start or to incorporate them into the composition. Ok, enough. They're just travel pictures anyway.

Day


Night

Beach