Ben Franklin is credited with saying “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.” Good advice in the 18th century, but maybe it’s time to reevaluate the percentages.
Photographic evidence used to be golden in a court of law, but in this day of digital photography and sophisticated editing software, can you really believe your eyes? We’ve all seen the Photoshopped animals with a cat’s head on a penguin’s body - pictures we know were altered simply by the subject matter, but what about the more subtle changes?
I once saw a very skilled technician in a processing lab remove an unsightly stairway from the front of a building for a sales brochure. Unless they had actually seen the building in person, nobody would have guessed the stairs were there.
What’s really scary is that it no longer takes the skill level of the lady in the photo lab. When I took photos of our azaleas last week, I took this picture:
Honey said she liked the shot, but she wished it didn’t show the house and the barn in the background.
I am a total novice, with no skills at all, but ten minutes in Photoshop produced:
If you know what to look for, there are a few tell-tale signs (the power line stops in mid-air, for example.) With time and patience I probably could have cleaned that up, but I think that the average person who had never seen the before shot would assume that the after photo was an accurate depiction.
It was bad enough when our perceptions were simply filtered through our prejudices. Now, it seems the more our technology advances, the more elusive Truth becomes.
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