Rants from the Hollow

I got off to a rocky start on the 2nd day. In what turned into my start-of-the-workday pattern, it seemed to always take 45 minutes before I was able to make clean prints. After powering up my computer and Lee Anne’s printer, I started on the 60 small head shots that would be cut out and put into wooden frames that are cutout to look like a body. The kids decorated them yesterday. My first attempt came out with a couple of horrible-looking green prints that would be perfect for a Halloween party, but maybe not so good for a Christian children’s craft. I ran the diagnostic and it indicated that one cartridge was empty, and the other nearly so. Did it drain out overnight? I replaced both cartridges, and after a reboot and a paper jam, was back to printing out a stack of photos.

By the end of the first day, I’d managed to get a stack of 5×7″ pages printed with a total of 43 head shots that were later cut out in circles to insert in the stick people frames. On the second day, I started to print off what would eventually amount to almost 100 4×6″ prints. I wouldn’t have been able to mass produce so many prints in such a short time if I hadn’t brought along a laptop and a copy of Adobe’s Lightroom software.

The printer turned out to be a high-maintenance item. Besides my daily problems with feeding it cartridges (I eventually used up 6 of the 11 cartridges that I’d brought with me), the printer also needed a lot of feeding. Several times I walked away from the printer for 30 minutes to photograph and video some of the other projects, and came back to find that it had run out of paper or had jammed.

Pictures to fit the decorated frames were printed by the end of the day, so I started a second run of the pictures used for the head shots. This time, instead of printing off just their heads, I printed off the entire picture. Some of the kids had put a lot of heart into the posing process, and I figured they’d be disappointed without seeing the entire photo (also, I figured some of the older kids might not be as excited to see their head on top of a popsicle stick).

By the end of our stay, I’d made over 175 prints.

We decided that it’d be fun to stick all the pictures onto a couple of the dividers in the centre so that everybody could see everybody else’s portrait. The younger kids seemed to get a real kick out of seeing their older brothers and sisters hanging up on the wall.

In the summer of 2006, my parents renovated the basement of the house they moved into the day after my June 1978 high school graduation. I was given strict instructions to remove ANYthing that I wanted to keep. In addition to my much beloved HO scale race cars, I found a slightly musty cardboard Kodak photo paper box. It contained a stack of contact prints and negatives from pictures I’d taken from 1976-1978.

My English and European friends aren’t fully aware of how sophisticated many of the extra-curricular activities are at an American high school. In addition to sports and music, journalism is also considered and important activity, participation in which can not only lead to a career, but it also helps develop citizens who are well prepared to participate in a democracy. Bay High, my high school in Bay Village, Ohio, has traditionally had a strong journalism program. When I was in school, we not only had a very competent yearbook, we also had a multi-page newspaper, printed on newsprint by a printer on a weekly basis.

Starting my junior year (11 grade), yearbook adviser Judy Coolidge decided that Bay High was going to have the best yearbook in the country. She chose and motivated an editorial staff of talented juniors and seniors, and set them to work over the summer to develop a theme and to choose a layout. They chose to name the yearbook “The Whole Bay Catalog”, as a pastiche of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog.” My senior year of High School, the yearbook was entitled “Where Do You Go To Find.” Planning went into great detail on the chapters, pages, and even page design (‘magazine layout’). Although there was always opportunity to squeeze in good shots, much of my work for the yearbook consisted of pictures taken to order, to fit into the pre-planned spreads on specific topics. It was a fantastic experience, and 30 years later, I still enjoy photography, but have never found anything as photographically purposeful and challenging as being part of the journalistic team that turned out 2 of the US’ top-10 yearbooks.

Finding a cache of negatives from such a fun and interesting part of my life was a thrill. These are not just souvenirs of my teen years–this is an important body of creative work. I crawled out of the crawlspace, and spent the next several hours poking through the negatives and prints. It was obvious that they had suffered a bit from their lack of care. I went out the next day to buy an archival storage box and acid-free envelopes, and spent another couple hours taking the negatives out of the cheap and yellowing office envelopes that I’d ‘temporarily’ used when I was a kid, placing the negatives into carefully labeled envelopes. When I was done, my archival storage box was almost full. I counted close to 2600 images.

Most of my favorite shots were there, including some that I’d won prizes for. Unfortunately, some were missing, including a couple that were very important to me. There were also a lot of pictures that I’d taken just for fun, or for practice, including color shots of hockey, baseball and tennis. In some cases, I’ve got contact prints without negatives, and those pictures can be recovered, although the quality is low.

Over a three year period of time, I’ve been laboriously scanning, restoring, and uploading the pictures to a web site. In early 2007, I first unveiled 600 pictures on a commercial photo sharing web site (pbase). During the following several years, I continued to restore and upload photos, sending email about the new additions to a growing list of almost 100 former students, parents and teachers. The lion’s share of the photos were done by the summer of 2008 for 20 minute slideshow for our 30th reunion. There are still some photos that have never been seen–mostly several hundred pictures of hockey. I’m finishing those up now, and uploading them to a gallery on my new, PERMANENT web site–this one.

As gleefully pointed out in When Satire becomes Ironic, a January 2001 article on humor site The Onion, made multiple jokes about the future Bush presidency that would come almost spookily true. Entitled Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’, the satirical article went online 8 years ago today.

Promises purportedly made by the incoming President in his January 2001 address included a promise “to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton,” assuring citizens that the U.S. will “engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years”, and pledging to “bring back economic stagnation.”

A Republican congressional leader reportedly said “Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend.”

“For years, I tirelessly preached the message that Clinton must be stopped,” conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said. “And yet, in 1996, the American public failed to heed my urgent warnings, re-electing Clinton despite the fact that the nation was prosperous and at peace under his regime. But now, thank God, that’s all done with. Once again, we will enjoy mounting debt, jingoism, nuclear paranoia, mass deficit, and a massive military build-up.”

There’s more satire come true in that prophetic piece, on the state of poverty in America, disenfranchisement of black voters, and the need to find and defeat an enemy.

It’s easy to take an “I told you so” attitude, but remember that the majority of Americans supported a pre-emptive war, although many of them subsequently revised their personal history when it went pear shaped.  It could just be a bizarre coincidence that the political humorists at The Onion managed to so effectively predict what actually would happen during the next 8 years, but I think not.  No one would accuse the Bush administration of excessive transparency; indeed, as Bush so eloquently said himself during his final press conference last week, ”We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.” Forgive me if I’m being ungenerous by suggesting that this was not an elected official who felt a duty to be frank.

In spite of a tendency to obfuscate, spin, and avoid answering direct questions, doesn’t this vintage Onion satire suggest that  the values of the Bush administration were, if not crystal clear (or should I say Kristol clear), discernible from the very beginning?  How much of a surprise can a collapsing economy and 6 years of aggressive war be, when peace and poverty be treated so cynically? It has often been said that a democracy gets the leadership it deserves.  I’m hoping that for the next 8 years, America gets better than it deserves.

NOTE: as verification that the original satire truly was published at the beginning of the Bush years, an archived copy from 19 January 2001 is available on The Wayback Machine.

It was claimed this month that a picture of an Iranian missile launch was doctored to look more significant. A recent Scientific American article asks Hany Farid (a researcher into digital forensics) how likely that is, and he offers several subtle clues to suggest that this image is not authentic.

Digital Photographs are inherently vulnerable to manipulation. Indeed, manipulation is an integral part of the process of capturing and reproducing an image digitally. Factors that affect the appearance of the final image are set even before a photo is captured, starting with the photographer’s choice of shutter speed, aperture, focal length, position, perspective, timing. etc. All of these are of course relevant to analog photography. Just as different films react to light in different ways, resulting in different images, the camera sensor and associated processing mechanisms output a bitmap that is not identical with the light that fell on the sensor. Before that bitmap can be turned into a visual image, it needs to be further processed, especially if it is a RAW image, which is what most pros and advanced amateurs use.

Although the journalism field has been discussing the issues and problems associated with digital imagery since the 90s, embarrassing photo ‘fakes’ have continued to leak into the major media, which has encouraged the publication of increasingly stringent guidelines. Last year, Reuters shared their Photoshop guidelines on a blog, an interesting example of transparency in the media. In it, photographers are discouraged from doing any manipulation of their photo, including exposure and white balance, and are encouraged to rely on in house experts.

This is an especially sensitive issue with Reuters after a rather obviously manipulated photo caught the attention of the blogging world, and then the mass media (a lengthy and interesting analysis of this and several other faked Reuters pictures from the same period appears on another blog). It is certainly not the case that such incidents are limited to Reuters. A Toledo Blade photographer was let go for pasting a basketball into a game shot, which turned out not to be the first time he had manipulated a picture in a way that was considered inappropriate for the journalistic context.

Photographic integrity comes down to meeting the expectations of the anticipated viewer. If the person who you intend to view your picture knew what you did to it, would they approve? If they saw a before and after, would they consider that you had attempted a deception? Would the deception be for their gain at your loss? Expectations vary widely between media. No reasonable person should expect that the photos in glamor magazines of models look anything like a live human, but in Journalism, even the suggestion of manipulation is unacceptable.

In this month’s case of the faked Iranian missile launch, the New York Times reports that Agence France-Presse picked up the original picture from a political web site, and then it was published on the front page of several American newspapers before France-Presse retracted it. In an age when newspapers are imposing ever-stricter standards on their own people, how responsible is it for a news agency to sell a picture that they copied off the web?

Technorati : Farid, authenticity, digital darkroom, image manipulation, orphans, photo integrity, photography, photoshop, trust