I found the starfish picture, one of the first I did intentionally. I didn’t arrange them, I just stumbled upon them in my travels, and it spoke to me.

Maybe a child carefully arranged them and left them on the well-worn step to go inside and get a snack or shake off the sand and read the latest comic book. The starfish are in the liminal space. Carefully attended and then abandoned. That reached in and grabbed me. I had to capture it on my little iPhone, maybe a 4.

The first one is the original, blurry, grainy, somehow raw. The second one is AI enhanced. Well, it’s ‘denoised’ if you want to get technical. There are so many tools for editing available to just anybody, and it scratches my itch to create. We can AI it into a whole other picture; you’ve got to know how to use them or the picture looks horribly over manipulated. I’ve got many of those, where I went all in on the HDR.

The AI enhanced one has the edges all smoothed and sharp angles softened, neat and polished. But that doesn’t capture how it felt then; how it feels to me now. I prefer the first, grainy one. It makes me remember. In my overactive brain, I’m truly transported. I can hear the water and birds calling, and I can feel the way the sand feels when you walk on it, the sun on my likely burned skin, feeling slightly sandy at all times, and how I felt personally. Recently divorced and dealing with a rebound relationship. My good friend trying to help me heal by taking me to the beach. I was learning to be just me, not somebody’s wife or girlfriend or mother. Everything I did that made me feel like ME, was gone. I felt raw and grainy and unfinished.

Just like the starfish.