Admittedly, I’m late to this party. I usually like to pick out one photo for the wallpaper on my phone and leave it there.  Maybe it is a control thing?!? 

This week I have decided to live dangerously and let my phone pick out my wallpaper. I didn’t relinquish all control. I limited my phone to only picking nature photos. (No need to have random receipts and evidentiary photos popping up all day.)

Imagine my surprise when my phone found photos I have long since forgotten, and the cropped compositions are better than the original. There is a lesson here. I evidently include way more in a photo than is actually needed.

As I tried to remember one photo….where was that??? Hey, that’s kinda nice. 

Well, hmmmm, I’ll have to figure it out because as smart as my phone is, it likes to keep secrets…..Oh, Canada! I forgot about that location. I never processed those. I wonder why?  Wait, that’s where people were canoeing. I don’t generally include people in my photos. I think that must be why I never did anything with them. But my phone is smarter than I am. 

I know that’s not a breaking news item, but it used to be just smarter in math and fact finding, but now it has invaded my art!

This is not the high tech AI generation that any device can conjure out of thin air. It is mostly low tech.

It has taken my photo, “seen” its potential, and cropped it in such a way that I never thought to do.

But how is it selecting the part of the photo that is more aesthetically pleasing than my original compositions? Probably just some random algorithm that happens to be working for me right now.

There were a few fails and duds but less than you would think. 

There are little parts of shadows and fences that I wouldn’t tolerate in my finished photos for publication. 

Then there is this one. What was I thinking?!? Even my phone decided to let my shadow be the star. Delete. 

It has been fun revisiting the memories of the landscapes in this way. It has been way better than the “memories” my phone used to pop up to share. Historically, those “memories” photos managed to be bad memories and just made a good day a bummer. 

As if my phone was taking pleasure in saying, “Hey, remember when that lady scraped the whole side of your car in 2015?” Or “Hey, remember that day when your dog got attacked by coyotes?”  Or “Hey, remember when the water heater dumped its contents and it cost a ton to fix all the rooms that were damaged?”

I would prefer to decide when I visit those memories….ruin my own day….thank you very much! 

There are 40 photos screen captured here and every one of them made me feel good in some way. 

They are not all home runs, but I like them. 

So today, I’m grateful for the random memory even if my phone presents my art back to me better than I thought to do it.