Stories tagged digital photography
Tags : Uh-oh. North Korea is trying to pull a fast one on everyone by posting a photograph of a "healthy" Kim Jong-il that appears to have been doctored. Look at the image accompanying the story and see if you don't agree that something fishy is going on. In recent months, rumors have abounded regarding the North Korean leader's failing health, although the government there continues to claim otherwise. This recent picture doesn't really help their case.
Since the advent of digital photography and image manipulation programs such as Photoshop, it's becoming more and more difficult to trust the veracity of photographs. We covered a similar ethics incident on the Buzz involving the a photo showing the launch of Iranian missiles.
Like this: But way better. And stuff.Courtesy Library of CongressProtect your grills, everybody, because the future is looking to get all up in them again!
Over the next two years, the oldest known copies of biblical documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls, will be digitally scanned and placed online for all the world to examine at their leisure.
Well, not all the world. Just the parts with computers and access to the Internet, and just those people who know and care that the Dead Sea Scrolls are available for public study. So not all the world at all.
The first of the scrolls were discovered accidentally in a cave in the West Bank by a goatherd in 1947. Over the next thirty years, more scrolls—about 1000 documents in total—were found in 11 caves in the area. The documents include texts from the Hebrew Bible, dating to before 100 AD. The scrolls are also reported to contain an astonishing number of recipes and very dirty jokes.
The thousands of fragments of the scrolls were photographed in their entirety (up to that point) only once, in the 1950s. Many of those photographs are now crumbling, and so, despite the arguments of some Luddites who are no doubt on the way out themselves, scholars are taking advantage of this amazing time we live in (the future), and are subjecting the whole of the scroll collection to some fancy pants scanning.
The images of the texts will be taken in very high resolution and with varying wavelengths of light, highlighting details not readily visible to the naked eye.
The physical scrolls will be beginning a tour of the United States next month at the Jewish Museum of New York.
US missile test: There is nothing wrong with this picture.Courtesy US Dept. of Defense (not Mark Ryan)Click here and look at the photograph accompanying the story. Agence France-Presse claims the image was obtained from a website of the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The photo makes it look like the Iranians are flexing their military muscle during a recent missile test launch, but in reality they seem to be merely flexing their Clone Stamp Tool in their (probably illegal) copy of Adobe Photoshop.
Now look at the stock photo on the right. This is a minuteman test done by the US military over the Pacific Ocean. I swear to God I have not manipulated this image in any way whatsoever. Not at all. Not one single pixel has been changed in this original photograph. Really.
Well, okay, actually I may have enhanced it just a bit, but only to make a point.
Photo tampering has been around since the earliest days of photography. It was (and still is) a practice used often in advertising, propaganda, magazine covers, and even news (where it is gravely frowned upon). So this kind of thing is nothing new. But advances in digital photography and computer software that allows for pixel-level image manipulation has really created an atmosphere ripe for extreme skepticism of any kind of photograph you see out there nowadays. And the Internet is full of such “real photographs”; stuff like the guy who keeps his dead wife encased in a coffee-table, paratroopers coming in over a lake full of hungry alligators, or president Bush having a good time in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. All lies!!
When I published a composite photo in a magazine some years ago, the publisher credited it as a “photo illustration” rather than photograph. And I had no problem with that. I’ve also sold (as photographs) images that were extensively manipulated by the addition and removal of elements to enhance the composition. Since I wasn’t trying to make any kind of editorial statement, I have no problem doing that. I look at it more as painting with pixels than tampering with photography. But it does raise the issue of photo ethics. Evidently, it’s okay when used in some ways (such as advertising where everybody expects everything to be a lie), but not okay in other ways (such as news photos).
If done correctly, and with a good deal of thought and meticulous attention to detail, a remarkable “photograph” can be created that even the experts will have difficulty determining whether it’s been doctored or not. Such as my fine illustrative example above. If I hadn’t told you otherwise, I’m sure you would have thought it was an actual photograph of multiple launches. People can be so gullible.
So, perhaps you want to join the Photo Tampering Bandwagon and learn the finer points of image manipulation, but you just don’t have the time to invest in reading the manual that came with your copy of Photoshop. Who can blame you? The thing is massive! I don’t even like reading it. But now, fortunately, there’s a wonderful series on YouTube called “You Suck at Photoshop”, which makes learning the ins and outs of what truly is a complicated program both fun and educational (especially if your current relationship is on shaky ground).
And, lastly, for those of you insisting on some sort of “science” angle to these posts, go here for that.
LINKS
More on the ethics of photo manipulation
Snopes Fauxtography site
So clear, you can taste the cheese: This image from the Apollo 15 mission is presented here with less than 1% of the resolution the new scans will offer. Image from NASA / University of Arizona.
The University of Arizona is working with NASA to put all the original photographs from the Apollo moon missions on-line, free and available to the public. The original images have rarely been seen—they are irreplaceable, so NASA keeps them under lock and key in a deep-freeze. Fuzzy, second-generation prints is all most of us have ever seen.
But now, thanks to digital technology, high-resolution scans can be made. And I do mean high: resolution will range up to 200 pixels/mm (the Internet displays pictures at about 3 pixels/mm), and file size up to 12 gigabytes. The resolution is so fine, you can actually see the original photographic grain.
Some 36,000 images in all will be scanned. The project is expected to take three years to complete.
Mine just sleeps. But a man in Germany decided to answer this enduring mystery by hooking a digital camera up to his cat as he roamed the neighborhood.
Scientists in England have figured out a way to read ancient Greek and Roman scrolls that had previously been illegible. These scrolls were found about 100 years ago in a garbage dump. Most of the hundreds of scrolls were dirty, moldy stained or burnt, and couldn't be read.
Previously invisible lettering of the Dead Sea ScrollsCourtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
In the early '90s, scientists working on the Dead Sea scrolls teamed up with NASA and developed a way to photograph the ancient paper using invisible wavelengths of light. (Light comes in a wide variety of wavelengths. Our eyes only respond to some of them. But scientists can build cameras that respond to wavelengths too long or too short for our eyes to see.)
Already, scientists have discovered lost works by Sophocles, Euripides, and other famous writers of the ancient world. Some feel these discoveries could completely rewrite our understanding of ancient Greece and Rome — and the beginnings of Western civilization.
