Here’s a photo that’s currently going viral on the web. As with many other viral photos, it’s being shared with all kinds of different descriptions, and people are simply passing it on to family and friends without bothering to verify whether or not the captions are real.
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Every social network has its share of spammers, but one type of fake account seems to be working particularly well on Instagram: airline accounts offering free flights. Roger Cheng of CNET writes,

The accounts have been pretty effective at garnering followers. Delta’s fake account already has 21,000 followers after it promised a free trip for the first 20,000 people who followed and shared the account. Likewise, the JetBlue account has 20,000 followers. The American Airlines profile has 5,963 followers after it promised a free round-trip flight to the first 5,000 followers. The accounts themselves are fairly bare aside from a few pictures and the offer itself. But there are no rules listed for the promotion, or means of contacting the airlines to collect on the free flight.

Airlines have begun disavowing the accounts, and Instagram has already removed a number of them (including a couple of the ones mentioned by Cheng). It seems like Instagram needs to launch a “verified user” system like the one Twitter implemented a few years ago.

Beware: Fake airline Instagram accounts promise free flights [CNET]

Check out this album cover portrait photo of the Belgian indie pop band SX, shot by photographer Benjamin Von Wong. While it looks appears to show the band standing in the ocean with the sun rising (or setting) in the background, it was actually shot in a much more controlled environment: a swimming pool.
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Joby sent out a press release today warning consumers that there are counterfeit versions of its popular GorillaPod flexible tripod floating around in the wild. While that isn’t too newsworthy in itself — what gear isn’t being counterfeited these days? — it’s the juicy details surrounding the release that are quite interesting. Apparently the company directly confronted companies involved in making imitations during Photokina 2012 in Cologne, Germany last month.
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You might recognize the photograph above. Titled Valley Of The Shadow Of Death and snapped by British photographer Roger Fenton in 1855, it’s considered to be one of the oldest known photographs of warfare. Problem is, it might also be one of the oldest known examples of a staged photograph.
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Earlier this year, we wrote about a new company called Fourandsix (pronounced “forensics”), a collaboration between a former Photoshop product manager and a professor who’s an expert in digital forensics. The goal of the new startup was to build powerful tools that would make detecting digital photo manipulation easy. Well, the first Fourandsix product is now available.

Called FourMatch, it’s an extension for Photoshop CS5/CS6 that “instantly distinguishes unmodified digital camera files from those that may have been edited.”
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This promo video for Nokia’s new “floating lens” image stabilization technology is causing a lot of discussion… and not for reasons Nokia should be proud about. After we included the video in a post today about the Lumia 920′s PureView camera, commenters pointed us to a post over on The Verge revealing that the video was faked.
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This image of a Canon 135mm f/1.8L IS lens was posted to Chinese forum Xitek. Most people seem to agree that it’s a Photoshop job, since the details on the rim of the lens don’t follow the curve of the lens very well. The question is therefore whether the image is some kind of early-stage mockup of a real lens, or simply a big fat hoax.
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Last year we shared the work of artist Frank Kunert, a man who builds and photographs extremely detailed tongue-in-cheek miniature worlds that look rather ordinary upon first glance. This short behind-the-scenes video shows how he goes about creating his images, driven both by a perfectionism and a design to not do any post-processing on his analog images. You can check out Kunert’s work over on his website.

(via Xatakafoto)

There’s a reason that most of the foods you buy never look like the photos used to advertise them. Food photographers and stylists have all kinds of random tricks up their sleeve for making food items look picture perfect. Here’s a list of various household products that are commonly used to make dishes look more appealing. A warning, though: you might lose your appetite.
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