This gun for hire

I don’t usually do extensive photo editing and correction on photos of people. It’s easy to want to just make that a little brighter, and clone-stamp this away, and keep making little tweaks until suddenly, you’ve got yourself a very different photo. I generally try to hold back. I can’t explain why — I just get a little twinge of guilt when I start getting a little heavy-handed on the Photoshop.

But it’s nice to know that if I really wanted I could run a serious photo retouching operation right here out of my basement. Only I use the term “basement” figuratively because I don’t really have a basement; I have an office on the second floor. And for a competitive $70/hour, I can take your photos to a whole new level.

Which also completely changes my perspective when I’m looking at those photos of catalog and magazine models. I could be ultra-perfect too, if I really wanted. Except for that slight overbite — dash it all.

But no, thank you, I’m happy being me — “Sarah, Plain and Short,” as my classmates used to call me when we read the similarly titled novel — thanks for that. I’d just rather be me running a serious photo retouching operation out of my basement in Belize. And by “basement” I mean oceanfront villa.