Photo fantasy

Nothing on this page is real. This is the Photoshop playground. The text is non-erotic.

^ topI think therefore I smile

Cogito ergo sum was Descartes' famous answer to his universal doubt. Sadly it is not convincing. The problem is with this universal doubt.

Existence comes first. If you don't believe you exist, all other problems fade away (for you). I believe I exist. It is possible to exist without thinking. The choice is mine. I choose to think. This clears up a whole philosophical muddle.

Thought and amusement often seem opposites; look at the deep frown of the Rodin Thinker. But not for me! I think, it makes me happy, I smile. And not just any smile. When my dentist made a panoramic x-ray I learned just how wide my smile can be.

Vanitas image, paradoxical smile, joy as antithesis of universal doubt, .... Cogito!

^ topMind power

The mind has tremendous power. Most basic is the power over nature. Reality is much more interesting than anything imagined. If we set aside our preconceived notions about the world and investigate how it really is, we gradually learn the laws of nature.

No one ever travelled into the Sun, and no one will ever survive such a trip. Yet we know in great detail how the Sun works inside. We have figured out all the thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, nuclear fusion, radiation transport etc. that makes the Sun shine.

Understanding gives us power, but not wisdom. We have attempted to light a small sun here on Earth. This can be done for the good, in the form of a fusion reactor that gives us and our children energy to live, or for evil, in the form of hydrogen bombs that can kill us all. To date, we have only succeeded in making the bombs.

A nuclear explosion is an awesome sight. It shows how far the power of the mind may exceed the power of the body. But it also shows how far we still have to go. Can we abstain from using the bombs? Can we develop peaceful fusion energy? That is a tougher challenge of our mind power.

^ topThe Sacred

Tell me, where did you have your most intense experience? In church or in the bedroom?

Some of the world's largest religions consider erotic nudity and sex sinful. Strange. Compared to an orgasm the average religious ceremony is lame and shallow.

Imagine for a moment what it would be like to have a religion in which sexual ecstacy is not just a part of life, but actually a path to transcend the mundane and connect to the eternal. A religion in which matter and body are not unimportant or even damned, but essential to experience the divine...

^ topFacing the Cyclops

Just click on the image and read.

What is it that you see in my photos? Everything? Really?
An erection is explicit. Right? It does not limit or narrow your view at all, does it?

Yeah, right.

(You might want to read up on Odysseus and the Cyclops, especially the word play in the orginal Greek on 'Odysseus' and 'oudeis'.)

^ topOut of time

Time marches on, always. Or does it? How could you tell if time stood still ' for a while'? Broadcast: "The public is warned that at 10:36 time will stand still for exactly 2 minutes and 14 seconds". Ha ha.

We use time to order events. Which events? Those that actually happen.

At midnight the clock strikes twelve. I take off my clothes and masturbate to an overwhelming orgasm. The clock strikes twelve. I sit at my computer, answering some late night mail. The clock strikes twelve. I lie in our warm bed. The clock strikes twelve. I toast my friends a happy new year. The clock strikes twelve. What actually happened?

^ topMeet the Horned One

Do you know what being horny means? Of course you do. It means that you become one with Cernunnos, the great Stag, that your hunt was successful and that you are ready for your union with the Great Goddess.

The christians came and were afraid of women. As patriarchs of impotence they ruled the land, and the minds. But you are free. You can make the Horned One appear. You don't really need a full moon, a standing stone and a twisted tree.

^ topImage correction

People have asked about my camera and image processing. The camera is an old, very simple Canon Powershot A75, so considerable correction is often needed. Here is a typical pic before and after correction with Photoshop.

Light in this place was not ideal. The sun was shaded by the leaves, except for some very bright patches. The main lighting was indirect from pieces of blue sky showing through and from green light scattered by the tree leaves. The dominant background color was green.

The poor camera didn't understand, and got the white balance wrong, giving an overall magenta cast and bluish highlights on the body. The magenta cast is easy to correct, but it turns out to be hard to give the body a natural flesh tone without upsetting the background. So a flesh tone correction was applied to the body alone. The highlights on the body also needed a separate treatment. I chose to give the pic a much warmer overall tone.

To make the body stand out from the background I darkened some areas in the background, giving a more harmonious image. I did two touchups: reducing the shadow of the 'love handle' on the body, and cloning out some of the distracting bright spots in the background around the penis.

Finally I did a little sharpening of the body and some of the stuff on the ground near the feet, and some blurring of the rest. The pic was cropped and then downsampled roughly by a factor of 2 to the 800 x 600 format shown here.