faked

Nokia Caught Faking PureView Floating Lens Stabilization in Promo Video

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.

Photoshopped Photos From Before the Days of Photoshop

Although Adobe Photoshop's introduction in 1990 spawned the term "Photoshopping", the manipulation of photos has been around pretty much as long as photography itself. To show this fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be holding an exhibition titled, "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop." The show will feature 200 'shopped photographs created between the 1840s and the 1990s, providing a glimpse into how photographers of old use their work to humor and deceive.

Random Things You Can Use to Make Food Photos More Appealing

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.

Outer Space in a Studio: Nebulae Photos Using Fiber Glass Lamps

At first glance, the images in Fabian Oefner's Nebulae might look like images of distant galaxies captured with a space telescope. They were actually shot in a studio using a number of fiber glass lamps. Oefner used exposures of different lengths to capture the ends of the lit fiber glass as points and streaks of light. He then combined multiple images into single photos to achieve the "star density" seen in the final images.

Photographers: You’re Being Replaced by Software

The image above is one-hundred percent fake. It has no connection whatsoever to the world of things. I created the bolts, lights, textures, and everything else in a free, open-source, relatively easy-to-use software package called Blender. It's easy enough that even a novice user like me is able to make a pretty convincing image. If you are a photographer that makes a living shooting still-life photos, this should scare you.

Camera Lenses with Custom Paint Jobs

A week ago we published a tongue-in-cheek post on how to improve the quality of your Canon kit lens by painting a red ring around it. While that wasn't intended to be taken seriously, we were pointed to a Korean workshop named Park in Style that actually takes custom lens body work quite seriously. What you see above is a Canon 18-55mm kit lens that they disassembled, painted, and then reassembled to look like a Canon L lens!

Amazing Mini Landscapes Photographed Inside a 200-Gallon Tank

Photographer Kim Keever creates large scale landscape photographs using miniature dioramas. He first creates the topographies inside a 200-gallon tank, and then fills it with water. He then uses various lights, pigments, and backdrops to bring the scenes to life for his large-format camera to capture.

Reuters Photograph of Rebel Firing RPG Accused of Being Fake

Update: Erin from Reuters contacted us informing us that this is in fact a genuine, non-manipulated photograph. Here's a good explanation of why it's real.

Reuters published the above image as an Editor's Choice photo yesterday, and almost immediately readers began leaving comments questioning whether the photograph was Photoshopped. The debate soon spread to other websites, including Reddit, and it appears that the photographs has since been taken down (though it can still be seen in its original slideshow from last week).

Faking Smoke Photos with a Plastic Bag

In his series "Elastic" photographer Edi Yang shows that you can fake smoke photography by shooting plastic bags a certain way. What you need is a strong backlight and some post-processing mojo.

Beautiful Tilt-Shift Video of Coachella

Sam O’Hare is developing quite a reputation for his tilt-shift, miniature faking videos. O'Hare is the same guy that created The Sandpit, a beautiful tilt-shift video of New York City that has been watched nearly 2 million times. He was recently commissioned by the Coachella Music Festival to create a similar video for Coachella 2010, and the resulting video (shown above) is just as stunning.

Canon 7D Footage Slowed Down to 1000 Frames per Second

If you don't have the $2,500 needed to rent a Phantom camera for a day but would like to have super slow motion in your videos, you can fake the effect using special software designed for the task. The above video by Oton Bačar was recorded on a Canon 7D at 60 frames per second, but was slowed down to mimic 1000fps in After Effects with Twixtor, a plugin that allows you to speed up or slow down footage smoothly. It uses warping and interpolation to provide smooth results, avoiding the choppiness that you see when you play normal video back in "slow motion".