Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Blowing smoke gate



Today Reuters released this photo of what at first glance appears to be a fairly straightforward case of an aircraft wedged between a lamp post and a power pole.

Wasting no time on the accompanying story about how it got stuck up there, I immediately set to work looking for signs of photo manipulation. This is where the Little Green Pajama Bottoms Media Kit really pays for itself.

See that street sign on the lower right? If you zoom in on it, make a copy and overlay it on the original using the burn tool, you can immediately see that that street sign is nothing more than a bunch of blurry dots.

Charles will be all over this tomorrow.

5 comments:

Andrew said...

Way to completely miss the whole point of the deliberate photo manipulation scandal. Good job.

Alison said...

Whoa, Andrew.
It was an important point, it's been made well elsewhere and as a photographer, never mind as a citizen, I assure you I take the manipulation of public opinion through the manipulation of images very seriously.

Too soon to make a joke about it for you?

Q said...

Thanks for the chuckle alison, and my idea of a scandal is a cynical terror alert system designed to terrorize your own people while giving a heads up to any real would be plotters.

Anonymous said...

Well I thought it was funny. It's certainly considerably funnier than the allegations that Reuters is carting around truckloads of dead kid parts to spice up their photos.
OK, maybe it's not.

Has it really become necessary to preface all criticisms of Israeli foreign policy with disclaimers that one is not anti-Semitic? Or parodies like this one with some ass-covering declaration of respect for truth?
How about first considering what a reasonable person might mean by any given statement?

scout said...

actually the green sign says 'no left turns' according to my manipu...er, ah, according to reliable sources.

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