F/stop is for Fake
iPM listener Rae Bentley Jones emailed after spotting the above photos in the Daily Mail. He's also seen an example of a shot of the Queen being "flipped" so that readers see her in mirror image.
"It seems completely wrong to me that the editor or whoever can just alter how a person looks and in fact misrepresent them."
The Pentagon likewise found itself in hot water with Associated Press after adding a flag to the background of a general's portrait. AP took Rae's view of photoshopping and pulled the picture of Gen Dunwoody when the alteration was discovered.
It's not all bad though....
Chris Newberry uploaded this image to our Flickr group ages ago.
"The guy on the right is the 'I' that I see in my mind's eye. The guy on the left is the 'I' that I eye in the mirror. I feel 19 (circa 1971, hence the rather large shirt collar), but my body feels its age, 55 (circa 2006, hence the rather larger girth)."
Drop us a line if you've airbrushed someone out of your family album, photoshopped your holiday snaps or been humiliated by a doctored shot.
Or, better still, send us a faker photo.
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"Flipping" happens a lot, quite often by accident. The two versions of the photo above might have been done for composition reasons though, so that the person looks out across the bulk of the page. Psychologically that draws more attention to the text especially as she's smiling towards it.
I can't see anything wrong with it, myself.
I'm more concerned with mucking about with TV news. Wasn't there a minor scandal at the start of (I think) Gulf War II when one of the news channels synched up the sound of some explosions to the visuals instead of leaving the lag that should have been there?
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Flipping the image or changing the background is child's play compared to what many magazine editors get up to with their shots of celebrities / glamour models...
Just type the words "Dove evolution" or "Photoshop makeover" into a well known video sharing site to get a glimpse...
And there were reports last week that photos of the model Karolina Kurkova often have a navel digitally added (apparently she just has a small indentation where it should be)...
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But when is a 'fake' a 'fake' ?
Flipping a pic has been a usual practice for years -as now is enhancing pics with the use of all those programmes available for our computers.
Even going back to the photos of the First World War, these were usually staged after the fact as 'plate' cameras of the time were not instant enough, ..and who would want to stand up in the middle of a battle for 10 or 15 minutes setting up a camera to take a photograph.
Surely a 'fake' is something porporting to be something else entirely. If you look at the picture of the American General Dunwoody. That pic was taken at the time of whatever was happening, and was than enhanced by the addition of the flag to improve the look of the picture for publicity purposes.
This is now usual practice and something that is seen as acceptable.
Personally I see nothing wrong in it -it's using what's available to present the best image ....something we all do in everyday life.
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Even the BBC have been guilty of this.
It's a matter of record that, when the television series "The Great War" was being put together in the early 1960s some film was reversed, so that the allies on the Western Front were always advancing from left to right and vice versa.
In fact, it's a problem that dates back to the earliest days of photography, since the daguerrotype always presented a reversed image.
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