Recently, a friend and photographer Ben Jacobsen of Ben Jacobsen Photo got his work into a third gallery. One of the gallery owners asked him “Is your work Photoshopped?” This is also a popular question often asked at Art Fairs and Photography exhibits. Why is this question relevant to some viewers? If you are asking this, do you know what Photoshopping means? Better yet, What does that word mean to you, and what is it that you are asking? Read more…
Sternfeld recognizes the passive-aggressive coerciveness of pictures, and enlists their manipulative power. “You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo,” he told the Guardian in a 2004 interview. “No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.”
[...] A century ago, anything a camera captured was widely accepted as fact. Today every image is presumed to be contrived. We’re wary of underhanded propaganda and attuned to journalistic perspective. Yet as concerned as we’ve become about pictures, we remain all too confident about our unmediated vision, which is also inherently selective, limited by when and where we’re looking. Sternfeld’s pictures remind us that, like a camera, our eyes are essentially passive. Like photography, observation is an act of authorship.
People often say that, for whatever reason, dogs often look like their owners. 27-year-old Swiss photographer Sebastian Magnani has been attracting a good deal of worldwide attention lately for his photo project that takes that idea to the next level. Titled Underdogs, the series of photos features portraits showing dog faces carefully Photoshopped onto the bodies of their owners. Read more…
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.” Read more…
Photographs of of Syria these days are filled with grim sights of pain and suffering. One Austrian newspaper apparently decided that the photos weren’t grim enough. Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s largest newspaper boasting ~3 million readers, published a photo this past weekend (top) showing a couple stepping through the rubble of a destroyed building complex with their child wrapped in a blanket. A powerful image… but completely fabricated. The original photo (bottom) published by the European Pressphoto Agency two days earlier shows a completely different scene.
The New York Times has an interesting article examining how retouching has spread beyond fashion and advertising photos into editorial photography, conditioning the public to accept images that are “heightened versions of the truth”. One reason is pressure from celebrity subjects:
The demands of celebrities also drive this broader trend toward perfection. Mr. Granger said that he found more photographers are being pressured to produce shots that the actors or actresses like because celebrities then will request the photographer in the future for other magazine covers or for advertising work. That can be critical because editorial work alone is not enough to sustain a career in photography.
Ms. Greenberg said that in 2002 she shot Tom Cruise when he was wearing braces. She used Photoshop to remove the braces before submitting the photographs but the magazine asked her to put the braces back in.
“I was sad because I was like ‘now Tom Cruise is going to hate me,’ ” she said. Ms. Greenberg has not shot Mr. Cruise since then.
German photographer Falk Lumo has an interesting post on his blog regarding full frame and crop sensors. His theory is that camera manufacturers have created an artificial barrier between the two sensor sizes for business reasons, and that we’ll soon be seeing big changes in the camera world as this barrier disappears:
[...] there is an artificial separation between the APS-C and full frame markets. Artificial because less people still believe that full frame must be expensive. And artificial because image qualities beyond an effective resolution of 20 MP may simply require full frame. The new offers from Nikon (D800 and D600) therefore directly address this and may accelerate the disappearance of the artificial market separation. This is known as “supercriticality”: the market ought to offer uncrippled, full frame enthusiast cameras in the $1,500 segment but offers APS-C cameras instead. Supercritical systems “fall” into their preferred state after only small perturbations occur. Once this happens, a D800 type camera will be in the $1,500 segment.
He predicts that full frame cameras will soon be much more affordable and compact as mirrorless cameras eat into the APS-C market, leaving “cameras with a full frame mount but a half frame sensor” to be “a curiosity of the past.”
It’s common knowledge that models in magazines are Photoshopped to look the way that they do — often to the detriment of the young girls that aspire to have these computer generated figures — but for the most part protests have come in the form of ad campaigns like Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. But in the past couple of weeks, 14-year-old Julia Bluhm decided to take a different approach. Read more…
Snapping a self-portrait of oneself in a mirror is something every photographer has probably done before, but have you ever created one in which there isn’t a camera in the shot? The images look impossible, but they’re not too difficult to create using some careful planning and clever Photoshop trickery. Basically, all you need to do is photograph each arm and your head separately and then stitch the photographs together. Joshua Dunlop over at ExpertPhotography has published a tutorial on the technique.
Shaofeng Xu’s photo of a protestor climbing a high-voltage electricity tower won Honorable Mention in the Contemporary Issues category of the World Press Photo 2012 contest. Read more…
