Remember this? What fun we had! But all joking aside, there is are a couple of important lessons to be learned here: First, people will occasionally manipulate images. And second, if you look carefully (or use computer software that looks for repeated - aka cloned - image patterns) you can spot these manipulations. But these obvious cases aside, there have been a lot of discussions - and various scandals - about image manipulation in the context of what we call the news lately, and it just occurred to me that instead of telling people what not to do I better come up with a suggestion what to do. (more; updated)
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Actually, it isn’t. But when you read articles like this one by Stella Kramer it really sounds as if it was. Where to begin? (more)
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This past weekend, I looked quickly through the latest photography project commissioned by the New York Times, photographs of abandoned houses etc., done by Edgar Martins. Since the photography did not strike me as particularly interesting, I didn’t spend much time with it, but I remember I was a bit puzzled about the stairs in this photograph. Updated below (thrice)
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The story: Photographer Jill Greenberg is hired by the magazine The Atlantic to take a portrait of Republican presidential candidate John McCain for the magazine’s October issue. “After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to ‘please come over here’ for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. ‘That’s what he thought he was being lit by,’ Greenberg says. ‘But that wasn’t firing.’ What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. ‘He had no idea he was being lit from below,’ Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. ‘I guess they’re not very sophisticated,’ she adds.” (source; let’s keep the “not very sophisticated” in mind!).
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In an earlier post, I looked into the kinds of problems one can get with “on-demand” book publishing - where you send off your book (actual the electronic version of it) to be printed somewhere else (only to then get it back with strong magenta casts on thin paper, for example). What appears to be somewhat forgotten is that before on-demand publishing existed, photographers published their own books simply (or maybe I should write “simply”) by printing photographs and then by binding the pages into a book (or getting this last bit done by someone with the necessary skill set).
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First, there’s this kitschfest, “20 beautiful HDR Pictures”. And then there’s Photoshop Disasters, such as, for example, the woman whose belly button disappeared.
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“Photoshop,” was my immediate response, followed by “I wonder what crap Hollywood movie this is from”, when I saw this photo (note this is quite a disturbing photograph!). And then I read the caption, and it turns out it’s a real photo, it’s a real person: “A French woman badly disfigured by facial tumours caused by a rare and incurable disease has appealed to President Nicolas Sarkozy to allow her to die by euthanasia. In an interview with the Agence France-Presse news agency, former school teacher Chantal Sebire, 52, begged for the right to end the ‘atrocious’ suffering inflicted on her by the disease which has rendered her face unrecognisable because of growing tumours.” (story)
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