Every spring the cherry blossoms bloom in our nation’s capital, and we are all reduced to children by the sudden beauty of it all.
Tourists and locals crowd the Tidal Basin to see. Grown bro dudes stumble over each other, laughing with excitement as they race to the water. Couples embrace.
As you would expect, everyone takes this opportunity to take a few photos. There are the younger of us who are looking to add another selfie to their carefully curated social media profiles. Then there are the dads who unclip their smartphone from their belt and hold it vertically for a photo. And there’s everybody else in between looking to preserve the indescribable scene that surrounds them.
But it’s never as easy as pushing a button. You can’t control where the sun sets.
So you have to fix it later.
Sometimes there’s a kid in a bright, distracting sweatshirt standing in the middle of your frame and you need to take him out.
And sometimes there is a trash can sitting between you and the perfect sunset. You do the best you can to improve upon your surroundings.
The intent here is that if you can capture something undeniably beautiful and share it online, especially on crumbling hell sites like Twitter for instance, you can squeeze something wholly good into someplace terrible. Pretty up the hell sites when you can.
And when you cross over the Tidal Basin headed back to the National Mall and notice something ugly, you remove it.
