My Memory of Them

"Let me begin with facts, bare, meager facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. I must not confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own observation, or my memory of them."

- Bram Stoker's Dracula

I had no idea what to do for a blip today, until I recalled the weekly challenge that I've been so slack about. This week's theme is "memories", and in response to that I blipped a bit of my phrenology bust that includes a supposed marker for verbal memory.

As I think about it, I'm going to blither on and make up a sort-of-but-only-a-little-bit link between the theme and the bust. ;-) Phrenology is clearly bunk and false and discredited. Memory is half the time likewise bunk and false. Oddly, it's not really discredited. Eyewitness testimony is thought to mean something. We all believe that things we remember actually happened - and more: that they happened as we remember them. Odd really, when we know that memory is not a passive, accurate record of events, but is rather a constructive, creative process - and it has been shown clearly and repeatedly that our memories of even major and important events are often at odds with the verifiable facts.

Worse: when you show people that their memories differ from reality, you often strengthen their existing (false) memory.

Now that was a lot of waffle for a semi-emergency blip....

I converted this to B&W using Snapseed, by Nik Software (they of Silver Efex). I did a fair bit of tweaking on top of their preset, but can't remember now what I did. Yesterday I did a conversion of another photo using Snapseed and compared it with what I got using Filterstorm, and was chuffed to find I (and mrs tsuken) preferred my manual conversion. This time however, the big guys won out, and I was going to go with the version from Snapseed. However...

... No exif >_< and the file was half the size it should've been. So I was faced with the task of trying to replicate in Filterstorm, what Snapseed did. Happily, with a slightly cooler white balance, and further pushed contrast, plus reduced brightness, I think I got it. Pretty much, at any rate.

Large version here.