We’re driving northwest on US-52 on the north side of North Carolina when suddenly Mount Pilot comes into view smack dab in the middle of the road. I wake up my phone and take a blurry picture of the scene up ahead. It’s a throw away picture that I forget about until one day my phone randomly decides to show it to me. I email it to myself. Open the email and save the image file to my winter 2023 work folder. Open the file with GIMP and convert the file color map. Massive crop to remove the car dashboard, do they still call it a dashboard? It doesn’t sound right anymore. Remove the window reflections. Open the notepad and use its top edge to check the level of the bridge. It is not perfectly level. Rotate the entire image a few degrees to the left until the bridge is level with the notepad window. Crop again to clean up the outside edges of the image. Use the color curves tool to push highlights up, lightening everything up then pull the curve down to bring back some contrast. I like a gentle S shaped curve to brighten up the colors. The picture is soft and has artifacts from the windshield and stuff so I’m going to lean into that. Apply a paint filter, canvas filter, maybe Van Gogh filter? Export to jpeg file, add a couple letters to the file name to preserve the original file, keeping both in the work folder. Copy the file to Picturelongmont folder. Log in to Picturelongmont, upload the image to the media library, create a new post, insert the image, add a paragraph block and write this stream of consciousness. Finally publish the post and wonder again what am I doing this for? Oh yeah, cause I’m a photographer. Last night I watched the film Asteroid City which is a whack of movie that stars Jason Schwartzman as a photographer. I really related to his character. The end.