Published
When I headed into the desert proper, I was struck by (apart from how freaking incredible it all is) how fake a lot of the vistas looked. Specifically, the way that the dunes get a blue-ish tinge as they get further in the distance - it actually looks a lot like an old Hollywood matte painting of a desert.
I think a lot of this is because we’re taught to see movies with matte paintings as fake, cameras don’t do a great job of bringing out this effect (this is the best picture I could get, though I am on a phone), and a lot of movies like to keep deserts yellow for mood reasons. So we’re left associating the representation that’s closer to reality as being fake.
It’s gotten me thinking again about how I want to represent reality in my works, and how to deal with cases where the human mind rejects realism. For example: do I use real randomness in resolving a quantum computer’s states, knowing that humans see real randomness as having patterns and being unfair; or do I use techniques that get the probabilities across more effectively by fudging the random element?