> What amazes me is that there are people who actually spot these things. dan Are you serious? ;o) Imagine if we had digital technology before the space race. Pictures of little green men on the moon would sure have helped justify why we (the human race) needed to spend so much money getting there to greet them ;o) Actually, on a serious spin (accidental pun) off is that there are people working on producing software to detect such fakes. But just as surely as methods are evolving to detect fakes - others will evolve to make them harder to detect. If we have a situation where there is no way to prove that a photo was doctored, and a legal system that accepts "photos" from law enforcement agencies almost unquestioningly, the citizen had better start to worry. But the point is of course actually debatable - after all, is posing with a plastic turkey for a "real photo" actually any different than having a photo of a real bird cloned in later? The "image manipulation" is not inherent in the photographic image but the imagination of the spin doctors (to influence public opinion). It's not only in the political domain, here is on from NG where "real" photographs were used in a "fake" context ... http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0407/feature4/special.html?fs=seabed.nationalgeographic.com And now too I'm thinking, cloing in a few crowd members to make someone look more popular (or should I say to make the news image more accurately fit the constructed one) any different from the "augmented" crowd noise that is becoming the rule at concerts, football matches and even political conventions? The cheering "boldened up" by speakers from the back of the room ... heck I fell for that nearly 20-y ago at a concert when I joined in the clapping for an encore, only to feel a twerp when I looked behind to see that there were only 2 rows of people that way but some large speakers ;o) The point, that I had been manipulated for a while - my reality was of being part of a crowd desparate for another song. Of course, we probably did want another anyway but the "experience" has helped along ... Bob "A picture is worth a thousand lies" 1) THE ETHICS/SKILLS INTERFACE IN IMAGE MANIPULATION Jenny Webber School of Communication and Information Studies University of South Australia, Magill, Australia http://www.csu.edu.au/OZCHI99/full_papers/webber.rtf 2) The Camera Never Lies, But the Software Can By KATIE HAFNER; TIM GNATEK CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FOR THIS ARTICLE. Published: March 11, 2004 http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9B01E5D7153EF932A25750C0A9629C8B63
