Tai Chi Master

I’ve spent quite a lot of money buying a camera and lens that can capture images quite this crisply:

Why is it, then, that I’m driven to experiment in Photoshop until I end up with images that look like this

and that I actually prefer to the original, though it’s not nearly as sharp and could probably have been captured with any cheap digital camera on the market?

Is it simply perverse human nature that drives us to want what others have and we don’t, and, once we have it, and only then, to realize it really wasn’t what we wanted after all?

Or do we have to prove to ourselves that we can do what others are doing before we can ever hope to find our own vision?