Summer is here, and with it, comes some of the most popular months for weddings. (June, August, September and October are apparently the most popular wedding months.) If you’ve ever been involved in a wedding, you know that photography is a significant part of the event — with standard family poses and slightly goofier “everybody jump!” shots. Until recently, couples were satisfied with simple photoshop airbrushing to eliminate facial blemishes, but now… there are some slightly more advanced techniques for a young couple’s wedding album. Here are just a few examples.
The universe has a sense of humor. I’m convinced of it. See, as someone who believes that humor is a wonderful way to deal with otherwise disheartening topics, I’m amazed at how often the world around me will give me something to laugh at when I’m feeling blue. Take the world’s current climate on the topic of religion, for instance. It’d be very easy to get down in the dumps over the Westboro Baptist Church, religious fundamentalists engaging in acts of terror, and the never-ending saga known as the Middle East “peace” process. None of those things are laughing matters. But then, reading the forlorn expression on my face, the universe sends me another story from the Church of Scientology.
The crowd was around 450-750 people. But the church claims it was more like 2,500, and it Photoshopped in the proof. Except the proof is about as convincing as your thetan’s origin story. In reality, there were no people in the right-hand side of the photo. There was actually a line of rented trees set up to block the view of people not so friendly to Scientology (see the photo below), as well as police blocking off a four-block radius for the event. And it’s not just that the picture was doctored, it’s that it was done quite poorly. They added people right on top of the trees in the altered section.
Tony Ortega has the two photos that demonstrate this. First was the “official” photo from the Church which is clearly photoshopped.
And then a shot from a different angle showing that the people on the right section above aren’t actually there.
What was an attempt to make turnout of the “event” look bigger than it was resulted in, at best, Scientology looking silly yet again for their combination of secretiveness and lying about their own events. Or, at worst, it suggests that Scientology turns human beings into a kind of hybrid tree-people, in which case we’re all going to be subject to an aphid plague that may undo all of humanity. Ahhhh!
So a word of friendly advice to my Scientologist friends: brainwashed graphic designers are a better asset than brainwashed Tom Cruises. For ever and ever. Amen.
There are a certain number of people in America that have the mistaken idea that there is some sort of right to not be offended by the speech of others. This, of course, stands in direct contrast to the 1st amendment, but not everyone is fully up on constitutional law. The problem is that when it’s members of the government who are confused, we’ve got a massive competency problem. We’ve covered earlier examples of this, such as when some New York State senators thought that curtailing free speech was a valid reaction to some folks taking offense. Rhode Island had a similar idea and it was similarly stupid. That said, misguided as these attempts are, at least they are usually made as a result of some vocal minority in the constituency voicing their concern or anger.
You see, some devious, twisted human being placed His Earnestness’s head on the body of a porn star. He did this for public consumption on the blog Georgia Politics Unfiltered. The porn star has a very nice body. He is a porn star, after all. And he is not Ron Jeremy.
The human being behind this affrontery has come forward. His name is Andre Walker. It is unknown if he was moved by the boast on His Earnestness’s own Web site that says he is both “accessible” and “audacious.”
However, Walker told Fox News: “The first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects all forms of speech, not just spoken word.”
It’s difficult to imagine anyone disagreeing with Walker’s assessment of how free speech in the United States works. Fortunately, that difficulty can be set aside, since Smith earnestly supplied the following reply to Fox News:
“No one has a right to make fun of anyone. It’s not a First Amendment right.”
Take a moment and drink that in. The statement is as impressive as it is incorrect. I say impressive, because in the world of long-winded politicians, you rarely see such a combination of wrongness and brevity. But, in case anyone in our midst is inclined to agree with Smith (who we have to assume is somehow offended at portrayals of him having pornstar-level man-junk), let me disabuse them of the idea that the first amendment doesn’t allow offensive speech.
There is a somewhat well-known anecdote involving a dictionary writer in days long past who is approached on the street by a conservative women’s group. The group congratulates him on not including any offensive words in the dictionary. In reply, the writer congratulates the women on their steadfast dedication to looking for offensive words. The point of that story is that there are people in our world who look for any and every opportunity to be offended. We do not protect the rights of American Nazi’s to march in Skokie, IL because we like that speech. We protect it because opening the door to the opportunistically offended to censor speech, even vulgar speech, is unacceptable. The end result would be the censorship of Salman Rushdie.
The fact is that the first amendment must include a license to offend, even if that means politician’s heads will be placed on porn star’s bodies.
You really start to get the feeling that some of these less-friendly nations aren’t even trying anymore. We recently covered how North Korea tried to scare the bejeezus (technical term) out of the States with an incredibly strange movie about a man dreaming of the nuclear annihilation of America, except they used video game footage to produce it. This wasn’t the first of such instances, but you begin to get the feeling that the attempts, at best, are not getting any better and, at worst, are getting even more lame. As someone who grew up in the 80’s, I have to pine for the days when a possible enemy nation really put in the effort required to scare the hell out of me. The USSR did this extremely well, causing more people to build almost-certain-to-fail bomb shelters than The Discovery Channel would know what to do with. Each silly attempt only makes me shake my head, mostly because I have to wonder who these guys think they’re going to fool in the era of the internet and its global group of fact-checkers.
Which brings us to the new fighter jet, unveiled by Iran and named the Qaher-313, which could well actually be able to fly, but you can’t know that from the photoshopped pictures released to state run media. Here’s a comparison between a stock image of Mount Damavand, a well-known natural landmark in Iran, and a suspiciously similar image with the new jet flying over it.
Look, it’s not that the jet doesn’t look pretty sweet flying over Mount Damavand, it’s just that if the majority world opinion is that your country is still using Russian war technology because you can’t build working models on your own, an easily-discovered photoshop of your plane… you know… actually flying probably isn’t going to impress anyone. Put some effort into it, guys. At least figure out a way to alter the cloud formations, so they aren’t identical.
Digital photography has created a massive amount of incredible images. Although professional photography has and always will require quite a bit of skill, the rise of amateur photographers is unmistakable. We’ve pointed out some cool photography before, and here are just a few more examples.
The age-old rhetorical and theological question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” seems to be finding itself answered more and more with, “So that good people can make bad laws.” Such is the case of a 17-year-old Citadel student who earlier this year found her personal contact information attached to a pornographic photo online.
High school junior Kelsey Upton was puzzled. Why was a stranger from Iowa sending her a text message?
Her confusion turned to terror last fall when she learned that the person who had sent the message had plucked her personal information from a pornographic website. Without her knowledge, someone had placed her name and phone number on the site next to a photo of a naked woman, in an explicit position, who somewhat resembled her.
Her father, a federal investigator who previously worked for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, traced the posting to a Citadel cadet, with the help of law enforcement officials. But to their dismay, Upton and her father learned that no crime was committed. Now Randy and Kelsey Upton, who live in Oxford, Ga., plan to meet with legislators and other public officials to try to make such actions a crime. “I want him arrested,” said Kelsey Upton, now 17. “But if that won’t happen, I want a law about this so someone doesn’t just get a slap on the wrist.”
Well, the Uptons are in luck. Sort of. The Agitator informs us that Georgia State Representative Pam Dickerson is looking to close this legal loophole by making it illegal to “intentionally cause an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction in such a manner that a reasonable person would conclude that the image depicted was that of the person so wrongfully identified.” This would include using a person’s name, telephone number, address or email address.
However, Dickerson feels that isn’t enough. She then adds:
“Such identification shall also include the electronic imposing of the facial image of a person onto an obscene depiction.”
Now, rather than just closing an unfortunate hole in Georgia’s libel laws, Dickerson is aiming to make a pastime as old as the internet itself, photoshopping celebrities’ heads onto porn stars’ bodies, a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail or a $1,000 fine.
Now, I’m not here to suggest that the long and storied history of creating celebupr0n makes this a part of our rich cultural heritage and an unassailable act of free speech. What I am suggesting, however, is this:
1. Creating a law to deal with a very specific set of actions with no real precedence or evidence of mass abuse is the sort of thing that creates legal clutter and goes a long way towards explaining why it’s illegal to tie your alligator to a fire hydrant in Michigan.
2. Existing libel/defamation laws should already be handling Photoshopped head transfers. There’s really no reason to take this from the civil arena and turn it into a criminal act.
3. It looks as if the Citadel is already planning on handling this internally as an issue between two cadets. Adding another law to the books is redundant at best and, at worst, is just encouraging people to holler for new laws every time they’ve been wronged.
4. If this law goes through, it will be subject to endless expansion, much in the way cyberbullying legislation has been stretched to cover such ridiculous acts as eye rolling and so-called “deliberate exclusion.” Offended citizens who find themselves photoshopped into other (non-sexual) compromising positions, like say, having their male heads attached to clothed female bodies or made to appear as though they endorse businesses and lifestyles that they clearly don’t, will feel the law doesn’t go far enough. The internet is a very inventive place while most lawmakers are not.
5. It will be ridiculed mercilessly. See also this post (possibly NSFW) and this clip (possibly not safe for your brain):
We’ve covered the uncanny valley of various visual works before, but it’s interesting that synthetic speech doesn’t seem quite as polished as digital photo and video editing. Apple’s Siri might be able to respond with some pretty witty comebacks, but everyone can still tell that the voice is computer generated. Here are a few interesting links on artificially-generated sounds and voices.
Photoshop has pretty much become a generic verb for altering a digital image. It’s so common to use software to fix flaws in photos that it’s a bit difficult to find unaltered photos now. Well, software will come to the rescue for that, too, and it’ll help people determine which images have been touched-up. Here are just a few examples of some cool photo-enhancing tools.
Digital cameras have really made the field of photography much more approachable. Even monkeys can take some pretty decent photos. So how hard can it really be to take some nice shots? Here are just a few projects that show a bit of the spectrum of artful photography.
There’s a story making the rounds about how the UK Advertising Standards Authority is banning certain cosmetics advertisements including Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington, because the images are way too Photoshopped.
The ASA says that ads can’t mislead, and the makeup company (in this case L’Oreal) did not provide enough evidence that the digital alterations did not, in fact, mislead.
Now, this story was interesting on its own, but what made it even more interesting is that another makeup firm, Estee Lauder, seems to be in a legal dispute, for the exact opposite reason. Ima Fish recently alerted us to the news that model Caroline Louise Forsling had sued the company for the following advertisement:
She claims that the photo was just a “test shot” before any makeup was applied, and was for a different product. She claims that the showing of her untouched-up face on the left has ‘irreparably’ damaged her career. Of course, in suing over this, she effectively admits that the image on the left is the untouched-up image. She could have just as easily told people that the right-hand side was the “real” image, and the left-hand one was digitally altered, and gotten on with her life.
Either way, it should be noted that in both of these stories, they’re about supposed “anti-aging” products, and I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that digitally altering images is how such products are advertised, rather than showing any actual before and after shots, because I imagine “real results” are likely to vary from what’s seen in any of these ads.
