#nofilter

What you are looking at on this blog is the real Huon Valley. It's the real deal. The photos are happy snaps normally taken with my phone. No Instagram-style filters. No rose-tinted glasses. What you see is what you will get if you visit or live here. The colours change with the seasons and are so beautiful, I don't see the need to enhance them. I'm no photographer, but seriously, it is hard to take a bad photo of the Huon River. It is stunning, just as it is.

I'm getting tired of filters that make the sky look bluer than blue and turn ordinary moments of family life into vintage perfection. Landscapes with added drama. Portraits with added softness. But last week a friend told me something I found quite horrifying.

Apparently, the good old school photo is now touched up, photoshopped or airbrushed - call it what you like. Now I'm sure many of us have school photos we would rather erase from history. Like the one where I had an allergy that gave me puffy bags under my eyes, during my 'chubby' phase to make it worse. Or that terrible zit at age 13. But what message are we sending kids about how they look if we have to 'correct' it? We're telling them they're not good enough. What might seem like a short-term self-esteem gain I think will turn into long-term body image problems. Celebrities look so alien in the airbrushed photos on magazine covers, with out-of-proportion body parts and plastic-looking skin. I'm hoping that pretty soon, Instagram filters will look passé. "So 2012," we'll say, and show the world in all it's natural glory, even the ugly bits.