faked

Photographs like the one above by photographer Shikhei Goh go viral on a fairly regular basis. If the stories are to be believed, given enough patience and a little (or a lot) bit of luck, animals can be captured doing all sorts of amazing things.

According to an analysis published on Weibo, however, the stories can't (or rather shouldn't) be believed. Photos like these, the article claims, are staged by photographers who force pet store animals into awkward and unnatural poses.

Think the above photo is showing a violent protest in the Middle East? Think again. The photo is in fact a screen grab from a video showing just how easily news photos of a 'violent protest' could be staged.

Flip through photographer Michael Jackson's "A Child's Landscape" series, and you'll find what appear to be vintage photographs of rocky coastlines that were captured with some old photographic process over a century ago. The images are actually modern photographs captured quite recently in Jackson's studio using rocks in a fish tank.

Full disclosure: I've never done commercial photography and don't exactly know what goes into making a picture for an advertisement. The only knowledge I have on this subject is the hours of behind the scenes work I’ve watched, the hundreds of magazines, blogs and tutorials I’ve read and, obviously, the billions of ads that have bombarded my field of view since the first moment I began to comprehend visual information.

When you’re in the process of building a photographic portfolio, you think long and hard about what type of photographer you'd like to be. I’ve read over and over that it's important to choose a specific area of the business in order to obtain the type of clients you're looking for. Before I began this research, I was under the impression that I wanted to be a commercial photographer.

NBC recently received some criticism for distributing the above photo of Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon to several news outlets -- some of which used it on their front page -- without disclosing that the background and road in the image were fake. Being an entertainment outlet, however, they were granted a pass; the fakery was obvious and it was the news outlet's job to figure it out and disclose it to their readers.

But one particular newspaper has drawn more fire than the rest. The New York Daily News was one of the papers that used the photo on their front page, but on top of not disclosing the initial fakery, they further 'shopped the photo and kept that part to themselves as well.

Want to create a long exposure photo but don’t have a camera that can keep its shutter open for …

The mid-1800s was a busy time for photographic firsts. In 1838, daguerreotype inventor Louis Daguerre captured the first ever photo of a human being. One year later, in 1839, photograph pioneer Robert Cornelius stepped in front of his camera and created the first self-portrait. 1840 held yet another interesting development: the first hoax photograph.

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.

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."

Nokia has already confessed and apologized for faking the optical image stabilization sample footage in a new promo video for its Lumia 920 phone. In case you weren't sure: yes, the sample still photographs in the video were faked as well.

Designer Youssef Sarhan did some investigative work after the story initially broke, and came to the conclusion that the images were almost certainly taken with a camera other than the Lumia 920.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This has to do with filmmaking rather than photography, but check out this jaw-dropping shot from the 1997 movie …

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.

A strange bit of news coming out of China: couples are opting to have their wedding photos faked using …

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!

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.

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).

Devin Graham shot this beautiful surfing footage using a Canon 7D and a …

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.

Design firm XNcreative shot some photographs with a Canon Rebel 550D (T2i) while …

Canadian artist James Birkbeck shot this creative photo wearing paint to look like a van Gogh self-portrait painting.

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.

Shukhrat of MINIMUS DESIGN created this time-lapse video of his favorite places in …

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".

Last week when Reuters released photographs of the volcanic activity at Eyjafjallajökull in …