Pictures That Lie

I chose to do this picture because I find it amusing that the majority of Trinity students don't consider it "weird" when strange things happen on campus.  For example, the other day I saw a random guy just scale a tree outside of Murchison.  He just ran right up the trunk! Nobody stared at him or looked confused.  It's Trinity. Everyone is involved in their own schedules.  Anyway, I find it amusing. So I found a picture of the fountain that I had taken last summer and found a picture of a zebra off of the stock exchange website.  I placed the zebra in front of the fountain because I thought it would be hilarious for a student to walk by something like that and continue on with his or her business.  I don't believe that this manipulation was harmful because there isn't an agenda behind it.  The pictures on the photo fakery website were manipulated to look either better or worse to the public (depending on the situation).  If the photographer wants to make a political statement, the photograph will most likely look more dramatic and/or tragic, and if someone wants to make a person "look better" to a particular audience, the photo will be edited so that the subject appears "more attractive."

The article that I found was not related to the ethics of photo manipulation, but rather detecting the fraudulent image itself (although it is clear in the article that the author feels it is wrong to submit fake images as real news stories).  The author says that the biggest giveaways for detecting fraudulent images are inconsistencies in light (especially reflected off of people's eyes) and sloppy copy/paste jobs.  I thought that the article was interesting because generally, nobody discusses how the fake images are discovered; people hone in on the scandal of the pictures after they are exposed.  Using this article, I'm more aware of the image manipulations lurking out there... and a little more self conscious about the quality of my own manipulated picture!

Farid, Hany. "Digital Image Forensics." Scientific American 298.6 (2008): 66-71. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.