Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
NBC’s Today show has attracted controversy after allegedly airbrushing an image of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas after she finished first in an event.
The University of Pennsylvania student was competing in the NCAA Championships when the image was taken. Twitter users quickly noticed the difference between the images and called out NBC for its apparent doctoring of the image. Further investigation, however, reveals that there is more to the story than merely that of a Photoshop misdemeanour.
In a Mother Jones piece, Ramenda Cyrus analyzes A1 coverage of last year’s George Floyd protests and contends that the media is still relying on old tropes to represent Black Americans. In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Allen and Sarah take a look at her arguments and the supporting voices of author Martin Berger and “Reading the Pictures” publisher Michael Shaw.
Back in June 2017, a photo of Donald Trump crashing a wedding at his golf course resort went viral. Jonathan Otto took the photo, shared it with a wedding guest, and it quickly got all over the internet – and ended up in the media. After Otto found it out, he filed a lawsuit. And recently, the court ruled that media using a snapshot from someone’s social network doesn’t constitute a fair use.
For those that don’t live in the UK, there’s a general election going on at the moment. Today is the day we cast our votes. This particular polling station is where Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, happens to be casting his. And as is likely around the polling station of each party’s leader, the entrance is littered with the media.
It seems that here, though, a photographer and video camera operator couldn’t agree on who was going to be standing in a particular spot. They both wanted the same shot as he was coming out, but to quote Connor McLeod, “There can be only one”. A quick shove starts to turn into something a little more determined as this 18 second video plays out.
Two police officers in Georgia were fired after videos showing them brutally beating a motorist spread like a wildfire on social media. A criminal investigation has been initiated over their conduct, and photos of the two officers have emerged in the media.
The official police portraits from the Gwinnett County Police paint a radically different personae than the actions of Sgt. Michael Bongiovanni and Officer Robert McDonald caught on video. The smiling faces of civil servants in uniform posing in front of the American flag create a cognitive dissonance in light of the assault.
Slowly, but surely, the worlds of cinema and photography are abandoning film as a medium. In the consumer market, it’s arguable that film is already wiped from existence as a business; film is hard to find and higher in price as a result because of the small market that still demands it. In cinema, it’s endangered. A decent amount of directors still stick to it, but the production companies need to be ready for the budget cut the cost will take.
The problem is that there’s still an interest in film photography, but it simply takes too much effort to pursue for the general consumer. At the end of the day, however, it’s the vintage feel film gives that most people would like to emulate. VSCO‘s been offering solutions for that for a while now. They’ve been selling plug-ins for Adobe Lightroom, Adobe CR, Photoshop CC, and Aperture; each plug-in comprises a variety of filters that literally emulate different types of film. As weird as that sounds, it works. VSCO’s great at what it does, and they just released the newest addition to their film packs yesterday.[Read More…]
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