Figure 1 – Extreme Selfie of the Artist, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

The other night I was watching the Olympics on television.  There are all these new sports.  It is just a bit bewildering.  And in the United States, if you watch the coverage on network television, you really don’t get that much coverage of any given event.  I understand the problem, but they never have found the right formula.  So when you find yourself contemplating the broadcasters, who haven’t lost a single lock of hair in the past thirty years, you start to wonder what is going on.

One of the interesting points is that winter sports keep going more and more extreme –   “extreme skiing, extreme snowboarding.”  So that got me thinking what about extreme “selfie-ing?” And needless-to-say since the whole show was getting pretty soporific; so I found myself trying it for myself.  As a result I give you Figure 1 – Extreme Selfie of the Artist.  I first tried it out with the front-facing camera on my IPhoe.  But as we discussed the rear-facing camera is a whole bunch better, and since you cannot see what you are doing past a certain distance it really doesn’t matter.  Just stare close into the lens and try to hold the phone straight and flat.

I am actually pretty impressed with the result.  The depth of field is pretty much nonexistent.  But where it is in focus, it’s surprisingly sharp.  And then we can go off on one of those mindlessly profound stories of how the eye is the portal of the soul, or some such.  Well, Dr. Freud, sometimes a pencil is just a pencil, and more often than not, a selfie, even an extreme selfie, is just for fun!