Elvis Magnets, Cock Feathers, Specks, Inadvertent Unpaid Advertising & Sartorial Misjudgments. The Destructive Effects of the Cosmic Joker and his Pranks upon Fishy Pics - A Dissertation

Fishing pictures rarely come out well do they? Especially self-takes of important fish, you know, the ones you tried for over a period of years and finally got to meet in the flesh, but only after struggling through a million lesser specimens to get to them. It's almost a truism that when you do bank that leviathan, something will go wrong with the camera one way or the other. It will probably overexpose and burn out all the detail in the fish's flank, leaving a blank white space that nothing can be rescued from because whatever detail there might have been just ain't there anymore, rather than underexpose, when almost anything can be retrieved from the murk with a bit of applied skill in Photoshop. 

I've lost count of the lovely pictures I have taken of myself and my inconsequential fish, but know just how many times a self-take picture of a personal best has come out not so lovely, and that would be all of them and every time I've tried. Why this should be I don't know. It's like some kind of natural law that this is bound to happen. It's as if Fortune smiles upon your day, but the Cosmic Joker gets wind of the good news, insinuates himself into the camera workings just after you click the self-timer, puts the focus out, ramps the exposure up a notch or two, and smears snot on the lens.

It never happens when someone else clicks the shutter though. Same light, same angles, but it'll come out just fine... 

These pictures of last Friday's tench were taken by Steve Philips of Watery Reflections. They are absolutely sterling and faultless as shots, but are full of internal flaws created by myself as actor. With the first, besides looking as if I'm about to nod off, the fish is held out too far toward the camera, which always creates the illusion that the person holding the fish is small, but never that the fish is large, because viewers of fishy pictures ain't so stupid as to be fooled by the trick for even a second. Look at the size of my hands... They're bigger than my entire head! The fish was just on five pounds in weight, but actually, it looks smaller than that held out so far, but if the fish was held against my body and still the same size as it appears here, it would be a new record tench at around twenty pounds! 

You can't fool anyone with this tactic, it just don't work, and I should have known better than to try. But, it makes for truly hilarious pictures of largish carp when anglers do it, and frankly preposterous pictures of monstrous carp, when the best thing to do would be not even try to pick them up. I would never even attempt to grapple a Gallic seventy pounder into my arms and try to lift her. Getting her out at arms length would be a trial of strength even Jeff Capes would struggle with, but it would break both my skinny arms off at the shoulder. I do like it when carp anglers pull this trick though, and do not disapprove of the practice in any way, because the results make for a great googling hoot over a glass or two of plonk on an idle Sunday afternoon.

In the second picture of a personal best cock tench with enormous paddles and protruding gonads,  I've performed far better. The fish looks amazing. It really could not have been held up better for the picture, with all those glorious fins on show and the light playing over the glistening smooth patinated bronze of its flanks. As David Beckham would be the greek archetype for the sculpture of the perfect male (would have a very small cock if he actually were...) this tench would be the model for the perfect male tench. Shame about that speck of white stuff though.

It also fulfills all the requirements of a satisfying trophy shot, because the fish is held near the body and at a natural distance off to one side, which creates no weird illusions, so the fish looks to be the actual size it really is. The fish's face also looks inwards, not outwards, which is a trick worth remembering because it looks far better than the alternative, almost always. However, I have made a couple or three  serious lapses of sartorial judgment here...

I found a cock mallard tail feather, one of those dandy looking curly ones they parade in front of the hens when they are randy, but shed after mating, and stuck it in my hat. I think it looks rather dapper in the first picture, but it drooped in the second to half-mast, which just goes to show how important these small, but crucial, fashion details are when on the bank. Thankfully it wasn't a double-figure tench I was holding up with a half-cocked feather in the cap. How infra dig would that be to any self-respecting angling fashionista?

Also, shamefully, I am wearing someone else's moniker on my fleece.... Shriek!

Korum's!

It's not Korum's fish, and I'm not Korum's angler... Korum played no active part in this capture apart from selling me a bit of luggage and the net to land it with, gear that I cannot possibly say is good, bad or indifferent till they pay me cash to do so.

Now this is just shite. Such a major lapse of sartorial judgement that I feel I cannot forgive myself for it. What on God's Earth was I thinking? Thankfully, I didn't actually buy the fleece, rather, I found it on a riverbank and it has come in useful ever since as a layer of warmth when the going suddenly gets cold. So at least I haven't committed the mortal sin of tackle tartery, I just recycled it, which is a green, responsible, and in some middle-class circles, even a fashionable thing to do.

And, to make matters even worse, though my smile is broad, as it should be, I have forgotten entirely that my right side always shows a big dark gap in my teeth where a tooth once was, whenever I grin. It's like the bullseye on an archer's target, and draws the eye to the black hole like a well aimed arrow.

Thankfully we have Photoshop, and though it can't make smallish fish look biggish, or put in what ain't there to begin with, almost anything else, even style disasters, white specks on fish and bad teeth, can be either taken out, or made over by it ~

Ahh. That's better... See how the cock feather cocks and lends jaunt to proceedings, how the now complete smile no longer draws the eye like an Elvis magnet (I have one!) to a fridge door, how the speck of white on the tench's flank is removed as an impediment to the eyeball's appreciation of its smooth and glossy surface, and how Korum cannot now make an unearned buck off my unpaid butt...

Not exactly the truth... but not exactly a lie either. But that's mediated reality for you. Becks in his Armani kecks = padding, but padding as a device to streamline the shape and draw attention to the wonderful way the pants form his bulge, not increase the size of it. Fashion models, for instance, are not beautiful women, they're androgenous clothes horses who concentrate the eye on the clothing they wear, not themselves. The clothing is taped on, not cut to fit. Ordinary girls with their strange but fetching beauty and big buxom curves, can't hack it in that business because the eye is drawn away from the clothes to their curious and voluptuous features and dwells too long upon them. They fit the costly rags all too well...!

I'm a trained artist, so I see these things, and can't rest with them. If I were commissioned by you to paint the same kind of picture, you would demand these kinds of things be removed or improved, because you too would begin to see them as the offences against the eye's easy appreciation that they are. This shot is a picture of that ravishing tench, not me, I'm merely an accessory to it, a frame for it if you will, and the frame should never draw the eye from the subject. That's a cardinal sin of art. 

At least I never messed about with the gorgeous fish though, eh? Just my less than beautiful self... 

C'mon, I'm fifty now. I need all the help I can get! 

And sometimes you do too, no matter what age you are, because, as I said, when confronted with a big lump, something will always go wrong with that all important shot, and if the pranks of the Cosmic Joker can be corrected, you will do anything to have them obliterated, because with a faulty picture of a special fish, it's either that, or live with it and lump it. This was a special fish. It's a tench, and they are, whatever their size, and it's high time I had a great picture of a personal best for the album and not another self-take disaster...

Now when I look at this picture, extraneous detail is not jockeying for attention with the true subject. My eye no longer performs wild and clashing triangulations between flank, feather, teeth and brand, but falls admiringly upon the lovely tench and stays there. And, it is a better picture for it, no?

So I can be forgiven. Can I not...

?