The latest news photo hoax has me thinking about authenticity in photography again. In the most recent case, a chinese man doctors an image of a train and a bunch of antelopes. You can read the article to get the full story, but the image they show explaining how the fake was spotted is pretty interesting. I expected evidence such as cloned animals or something much more obvious. For example, one explanation depends on an antelope that kind of looks pregnant. Another says that the antelope would be more scattered if they were running from a train. One explanation is just flat wrong. It says that the train should be blurred and the antelope should be more in focus because the train is going 60 mph and the antelope are running slower. This explanation doesn’t hold up because the train is several hundred meters away. The antelope may not be going 60 mph but I bet their legs are and they are closer to the camera. I am not saying that the photo is real, but can’t we get an explanation that holds up to scrutiny?

Luckly, there are real professionals working to scientifically disprove the authenticity of photographs. There is an interesting article on wired.com that talks about methods that companies like Adobe are developing to spot altered photos. Adobe seems like the last company you would turn to lead the hunt for photo hoaxers considering they have made a fortune off of convincing everybody how easy/safe/fun it is to enhance and manipulate our photographs. Nevertheless, as the industry leader in photo manipulation they have to address a growing concern about the authenticity of photography. So Adobe finds itself in an interesting conundrum. How do you use a technology that is meant to alter photography to identify the people who are creating hoaxes? Where does harmless photo enhancement end and illegal photo manipulation begin? How do you convince a skeptical population to trust photography as the truth? They have a quote from Kevin Connor, who is senior director of product management at Adobe. He says,

“There’s much more awareness and much more skepticism when (people) are looking at images. That’s why we think that’s something we need to get involved in. It’s not healthy to have people be too skeptical about what they saw.”

Not healthy to question what you see? That is a shocking statement when you consider what he is implying, that it is healthy to accept what you see as real without questioning. Yikes! The article closes without really giving much hope that there will ever be a trustworthy way of telling whether or not a photo has been altered. While that may seem like a tragedy, it is a side effect of an advancing civilization. Think about the past when photos represented the “truth.” That was a more dangerous time because it ignored the editorial nature of photography. Think of all the manipulation that happens to an image in camera. Somebody has to pick the subject matter. The photographer isn’t an emotionless bystander. He composes his shot with an agenda. He choses the exposure and controls the focus. These are editorial decisions. You can make the same old lady look like a saint or a witch just by how you choose to take her picture. To accept an image as “truth” regardless of how it was originated is dangerous. Defense attorneys, law enforcement, news organizations, protective governments, conspiracy theorists, traditionalists and photography purists will continue to find ways authenticate and de-authenticate photos. I can’t blame them, but I firmly believe that a skeptical population is a better alternative to blind unquestioning masses.

I finally got the camera I have always wanted. No, it wasn’t a Hasselblad or a Mamiya or a Leica. The camera that has been on my wish list longer than any other is the Pentax K1000. Sure, I could pick one up on Ebay for under $100 but I just figured that someday the classic camera would just find its way into my collection. That is pretty much what happened. I love having a story to go along with a camera and now I have one that I will probably be telling quite a few times in the future. Here is how the classic tank of a camera came into my collection…
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I picked up the $49 software bundle from MacHeist last week and finally got to play with some of the applications this weekend. (If you are on a Mac, don’t miss the MacHeist deal!) The gem of the bundle for me was a program called iStopMotion. In a nutshell, it allows you to easily make stop motion movies. As I was playing with it I thought it would be really handy to be able to control the program with the Apple remote. Another MacHeist goody (although it isn’t part of the bundle - you had to play the games to win it) was an application called Sofa Control. With Sofa Control you can create custom scripts that let you control any application with the Apple remote. It was very easy and I thought I would share the script with anybody who might find it handy. Here is what the script does:

iStopMotion Apple Remote Mapping:
* Plus: Play
* Left: Previous Frame
* Right: Next Frame
* Play: Capture Frame
* Play Hold: Save Movie

(Click here to download the iStopMotion Sofa Control script)

If you have ever traveled through the midwest across states like Kansas or Nebraska it probably isn’t something you look forward to doing again. Call me crazy but I kind of like those long boring drives. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to do it regularly, but when the trek is only for holidays I always find myself looking forward to the drive. There is something therapeutic about being behind the wheel for 8 hours or more. No distractions. Nowhere to go. Nothing but your thoughts. No excuses for not thinking about the things that are so easy to ignore when you are “plugged in.” By the time I arrive I am road weary but I also feel rebooted.

For Thanksgiving we drove home to Nebraska and I decided to make a timelapse of the drive. I strapped the camera to the dashboard and told the camera to take a picture every seven seconds. The result is what it would look like if you were driving at 25,000 miles per hour:

The photo on the right is one of maybe three photos that I am really proud of. Part of it is that I think it is just a great moment, but I think it is probably because I am so emotionally connected to it. It was taken during a parade in Grand Island, Nebraska on a wonderful autumn weekend spent visiting friends and family. It was one of the first rolls of film shot for my college photography class. I was nearly bursting with excitement for that class and couldn’t wait to take pictures with my new Pentax ZX5n. I remember breaking away from my friends and walking down the street looking for something to take a photo of. Then all of a sudden this moment happened in front of me. It was surreal. I remember being literally scared as I took the photo. This was it! I only took one shot but I knew it was a good one. I think I was shaking as I walked away from that scene. I have never had that feeling since.

Since I snapped the picture almost ten years ago I have probably spent more time working with this image than any other image in my collection but I have never had it framed. I just couldn’t get it exactly right. At school I remember spending many frustrating hours in the darkroom working on enlargements. I nearly went broke dodging and burning and cropping and enlarging before I finally had a print that was acceptable. Years later, before I had access to a good film scanner I scanned the prints and began Photoshopping. Looking back at those files it is embarrassing to see how heavy-handed I was.

So this weekend I went back to this image to see if I can “remaster” it. I decided to ditch my earlier digital scans taken from prints and rescan the original negative. I dug the negative out and was relieved that it was still in good shape. I got a good scan and brought it into Photoshop. I have struggled with cropping the image before and decided not to crop it this time. I tried to be very subtle in my dodging and burning. In the past I tried to push the contrast so that every detail was as defined as possible. This time I held back and left things alone so that it would look more natural. Interestingly, this “final” print probably took less time than any of my earlier attempts because I didn’t try to make it something that it wasn’t. It feels good to finally be satisfied with the print and be able to let it live in my archive instead of my to-do list.

A few years ago, I found myself in a dumpster taking photos of some lovely textures (What, you have never been in a dumpster before?). Among the garbage I found a box of photographs. I was so fascinated by these found images that I have been collecting discarded photos ever since. I love the idea of finding beauty in things that other people consider garbage. Whether it is a texture on the inside of a dumpster, or in a photograph you find in the trash, the exercise of keeping your eyes open for design is something I believe most designers practice. Actually, this is the same process that BE A DESIGN GROUP is built around. Our collection of BA photos is a metaphor for always keeping our eyes open to ways design is interacting with the world around us.

As a way to display some of my own photography as well as to share my collection of found photographs, I just finished creating a photo blog called Found Photography. I have been sharpening my Movable Type skills with the plan of incorporating the templates of Found Photography in the upcoming BE A DESIGN GROUP photo blog. Hopefully all it will need is a quick tweak to convert it, but let me know if you have any suggestions that would improve the usability or structure of the site. Look for us to launch our photo blog in October.