Cleaning Up the Little Things

Photographers are taught over and over again to keep clutter out of our images.  Simple is usually better.

Sometimes you do that before you take the picture.  How you set up the composition can help.  The angle, the light, the distance from you subject can all affect how "clean" your image is.

Sometimes you can clean up your image in post-processing. There are many programs that will help you with this.  Many people are familiar with Photoshop.  It is one program that photographers use.

Now before the photo purist start to rant, let me point out that Ansel Adams, one of the great photographers of the past, altered his images in the dark room.  He cleaned them up there, just like photographers do now with computer programs.

This is an image that I "cleaned" in post-processing.

Here is the before image.

There is a dramatic difference.

I just took out a lot of little things.

Our life is like that.  We let lots of little sins creep in over time.  After a while our life is cluttered with lots of little sins.  Are they less "sinful" than the big ones?  I think not.

While it would be better to take those sins out before they happen, like the photographer cleans an image before it is taken, we often don't do that.  So, let's examine our life and clean up all those little things we do that we know don't please God.

Wash me throughly from my iniquity

And cleanse me from my sin.

Psalms 51: 2