Lies photography told me by Anna Gorin Via Flickr: They say comparison is the thief of joy but when you've never visited a place before, you have to set the benchmark somehow to see what else is already out there, right? Combine the Emerson wisdom of going where there is no path and leaving a trail, and learning from the masters who came before you?
Photographers are beautifully mesmerizing liars sometimes though, and I don't even mean anything touching Photoshop. It's all in the way we choose to present a scene. Once I remember trying to find an epic-looking waterfall along the Oregon Coast at Hug Point, only to discover I was taller than the waterfall and the clever, clever photographer had gotten a near ground-level wide-angle perspective that made the thing look massive.
So it is with famous Machu Picchu, up there with the most iconic views in the whole wide world. Photographs can make you believe it's this deserted ghostly Inca fortress, which sounds great until you're there at mid-day struggling for elbow room and avoiding being knocked off a terrace by a selfie stick. Maybe we should tell it like it is more often.
But add me to the list of liars, because here I am showing Machu Picchu not as it looked most of the time I was there, but in the very last beautiful minutes at golden hour before the irritable guards started blowing their whistles and gesturing that the site was about to close and I needed to leave. It looks so empty here - Machu Picchu as we we think it should be. It's not Photoshop. But all the same, don't believe a thing you see, because it's only a fraction of the truth. And so I'm joining the photographic tradition and setting everyone else up for unrealistic expectations of their Machu Picchu visit, so they too can arrive, take in the view swarming with tourists, and think "...another lie photography told me."
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