Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: John Than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech area. It's time for a classic
Speaker 1: episode of tech Stuff. This episode is titled Photo Editing
Speaker 1: and Manipulation Art one, So I guess you can probably
Speaker 1: make an educated guess about what next week's classic episode
Speaker 1: is going to be. This episode originally published on August
Speaker 1: thirty one, two thousand fifteen. Dylan, who at the time
Speaker 1: was sort of working in our our social media and
Speaker 1: marketing areas, was a guest host on this one. Now
Speaker 1: Dylan is a managing executive producer with I Heart, So
Speaker 1: the dude is a superstar at I Heart really is
Speaker 1: an incredible person, does incredible work. By way back then,
Speaker 1: Dylan was fairly new and uh so I decided to
Speaker 1: show in the ropes and have them on to talk
Speaker 1: about manipulating photos online for fun and profit. Enjoy. Dylan
Speaker 1: has generously offered up some of his precious time to
Speaker 1: jump into the studio to talk about photo manipulation and
Speaker 1: photo editing. So this is going to be a two
Speaker 1: part podcast. We know that starting off, we're gonna concentrate
Speaker 1: on sort of the pre digital era for this first episode,
Speaker 1: and then our next one will be kind of the
Speaker 1: various techniques and motivations behind photo manipulation and the post
Speaker 1: digital era where we're no longer talking necessarily about physical
Speaker 1: media but lots of zeros and ones instead. But the
Speaker 1: the interesting thing to me is that photo manipulation has
Speaker 1: been around almost as long as photography has, and in
Speaker 1: large part because of the limitation of photography, especially the
Speaker 1: early days, it was kind of seen early on as Okay, well,
Speaker 1: we have the foundation down, now how do we make
Speaker 1: up for all the things that we can't do at
Speaker 1: least yet. You know, you don't know in their mind
Speaker 1: if they knew that was going to be a possibility
Speaker 1: in the future, but um, it kind of gave them
Speaker 1: the ability to add to a photo what cameras were
Speaker 1: not able to do at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, those
Speaker 1: early cameras were incredibly limited. And uh, you know, it
Speaker 1: helps if we take kind of a step back and
Speaker 1: look at a little bit of history. And by a
Speaker 1: little bit of history, I mean I've created a timeline
Speaker 1: to kind of walk us through the early development no
Speaker 1: pun intended. Okay, no, that was definitely a pun intended
Speaker 1: of photography. So before we get to any photography at all,
Speaker 1: before we get to the point where we're recording light
Speaker 1: onto some medium, we can talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the camera obscura, which was not necessarily about recording recording images,
Speaker 1: but more about projecting them. Yes, and this is ancient technology.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you think about it, the basic technology
Speaker 1: was a dark chamber or room through which you have
Speaker 1: a hole in one wall and then you can project
Speaker 1: across the on the opposite wall. Yeah, and uh, what
Speaker 1: you saw on the opposite wall would be correct in perspective,
Speaker 1: but it would be eight degrees rotating hundred degrees. It
Speaker 1: would be upside down. Yeah. So I I have often
Speaker 1: seen this used as a way for artists who wanted
Speaker 1: to do a big wall mural. For example, they would
Speaker 1: have an image on one side, so it would be
Speaker 1: projected large on the opposite where they could actually trace
Speaker 1: things out, although not all artists were very capable of
Speaker 1: doing this, and it wouldn't be until the Renaissance. Like
Speaker 1: even though the technology itself was thousands of years old,
Speaker 1: in the sense that the ancient Chinese and Greek we're
Speaker 1: using the sort of yeah, it really does. It's always
Speaker 1: like it's always like, well, you have you got to
Speaker 1: look to the Middle East and you gotta look to
Speaker 1: China for some of these amazing developments that took a
Speaker 1: long time to make their way to the Western world.
Speaker 1: But in the Renaissance, there was an Italian writer named
Speaker 1: Gia Batista de la Porta who was really the first
Speaker 1: to use a lens arrangement in camera scarre. So it
Speaker 1: was more than just the simple hole or a mirror.
Speaker 1: It was a lens. And uh, that's where we started
Speaker 1: really calling it camera obscura. And then you move ahead
Speaker 1: about a hundred two hundred years to seventy seven, and
Speaker 1: that's when a gentleman by the name of Johann Heinrich
Speaker 1: Schulz uh noticed something really odd. In fact, it was
Speaker 1: something that other people had noticed, but he was the
Speaker 1: one who actually put two and two together. We're talking
Speaker 1: silver salts here. Now, silver salts, when exposed to light, uh,
Speaker 1: get darker. And this is a major part of early photography.
Speaker 1: But for a long time people thought that it was
Speaker 1: heat that made the salts turn dark. Now, what Schultz
Speaker 1: did was he had an experiment where he he had
Speaker 1: essentially a surface covered in silver salts, and he put
Speaker 1: a covering over it so that he could spell out
Speaker 1: a word in the silver salt and then expose that
Speaker 1: to light, and it made those salts turn dark. So
Speaker 1: he actually could spell out words using light this way,
Speaker 1: but he didn't have any way of preserving it. There's
Speaker 1: no way for him to keep this so that it
Speaker 1: would permanently have this word. In fact, as soon as
Speaker 1: you remove the covering and the rest of the salts
Speaker 1: are exposed to light, everything turns dark. So it's like
Speaker 1: you have a temporary image. It's kind of like the
Speaker 1: Snapchat of its day. Yeah, that a very very kind
Speaker 1: of simple snapchat where someone would have to be in
Speaker 1: there with you and be like, all right, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to look at this right now, because as soon
Speaker 1: as I turn on the light, this sucker, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's time. Will be very limited a latent image. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: in a way that like if you see something very
Speaker 1: bright and you close your eyes, right there it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it wouldn't be until the eighteen twenties. That's when
Speaker 1: a fellow by the name of Anissa four Neepsie thank
Speaker 1: you for pronouncing that that's a guess, my French jump.
Speaker 1: Papa francis bien malorism So I am not very good
Speaker 1: with the French pronunciation. I haven't had French since high school,
Speaker 1: so I apologize for butchering the name. But he developed
Speaker 1: a technique to use light in order to make copies
Speaker 1: of engravings. And what he would do is he would
Speaker 1: take it engraving and covered in oil and then he
Speaker 1: would put the engraving on a plate that was coated
Speaker 1: with a combination of lavender oil and vitamin of Judea,
Speaker 1: which is a light sensitive material. And yeah, and he
Speaker 1: had the first successful image in eighteen sixteen. Yeah, amazing, right,
Speaker 1: Like he was able to use this and he called
Speaker 1: the process heliography, meaning from the sun to right, so
Speaker 1: it was close to photography, but he was calling it heliography.
Speaker 1: By eighteen twenty six he was using that process on
Speaker 1: lots of stuff like lithographic stone, on glass, on zinc,
Speaker 1: and on pewter plates. And in eight he used a
Speaker 1: camera obscura computer plate to produce a photograph from nature.
Speaker 1: It was an image of the courtyard of his estate.
Speaker 1: It was taken from an upstairs balcony and over the
Speaker 1: course of eight hours. Yes, it took a number of hours. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the real issue where with these early approaches
Speaker 1: is that they had not perfected the chemistry necessary to
Speaker 1: have this reaction of light that would affect chemicals in
Speaker 1: such a way as to preserve an image. What's really
Speaker 1: funny is that the lens technology was much farther ahead
Speaker 1: from the start than the chemist street and a lot
Speaker 1: of early photography was really only limited by the chemicals involved. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you would end up having these super long exposure
Speaker 1: times in the in some cases it meant that the
Speaker 1: the image you produced is otherworldly because in the case
Speaker 1: of this one with a courtyard, the lights coming from
Speaker 1: the sun, and it's over the course of eight hours,
Speaker 1: which reads, the sun starts in the east and ends
Speaker 1: in the west, So in the finished image you have
Speaker 1: light from the sun shining from both directions. It's as if,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously, we don't live in a world where
Speaker 1: you can really do that in a in an instant.
Speaker 1: You would have to have this long exposure time in
Speaker 1: order to achieve that, so kind of a special effect
Speaker 1: just by the very limitation of the media itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the exposure time is early on would would make things,
Speaker 1: like you said, look very otherworldly. And it was just
Speaker 1: because it was out of necessity, that's what they had. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they didn't have any option really like, it wasn't like
Speaker 1: it had nothing to do with shutter speed or any
Speaker 1: of the other stuff we talked about with cameras. It
Speaker 1: had specifically to do with the limitation of the materials,
Speaker 1: the chemicals they were using. By eighteen thirty three, that's
Speaker 1: when we first start seeing the term photograph being used. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in fact, it was apparently coined by a fellow
Speaker 1: named Hercules Florence or Hercule floren if you want to
Speaker 1: be fancy. Uh. He coined the term, using it to
Speaker 1: describe a process in which he used paper with silver
Speaker 1: salts to produce prints of drawings. However, his work actually
Speaker 1: largely took place in Brazil, and because Brazil was so
Speaker 1: far removed from all the other areas that we're looking
Speaker 1: into this mostly in Europe, his work remained largely unknown
Speaker 1: until the nineteen seventies. And I would like to notice
Speaker 1: is his really interesting work. It's something to look into.
Speaker 1: He had some nice photographs. Yeah. Yeah, And and our
Speaker 1: next fellow who made a big impression on photography is
Speaker 1: one that probably most people have heard, at least heard
Speaker 1: the technology named after him. That would be uh, Louis Jacquemond,
Speaker 1: the gear type. Yeah. So he used the camera obscura
Speaker 1: in a plate of iodized silver, which would allow him
Speaker 1: to create a latent image of a scene. That's what
Speaker 1: Dylan was talking about just a minute ago. And he
Speaker 1: found that if you expose that plate to mercury vapor,
Speaker 1: the exposed parts of the image, the ones that had
Speaker 1: been exposed to light, would become visible, so it would develop.
Speaker 1: This is where we start talking about developing photographs, and
Speaker 1: that approach reduced the exposure times needed eventually from eight
Speaker 1: hours down to around half an hour ish um using
Speaker 1: this particular approach, But there was a drawback. If the
Speaker 1: developed picture was exposed to light, like after you've taken it,
Speaker 1: then the unexposed areas of silver would continue to darken
Speaker 1: and eventually the image would become impossible to see. Dylan
Speaker 1: and I will be back in just a moment to
Speaker 1: talk more about photo editing and manipulation after these messages.
Speaker 1: Imagine that you have a photograph in your hand and
Speaker 1: you take it out anywhere where there's light, and it
Speaker 1: would just gradually become a dark picture, like there will
Speaker 1: be no no, no way of distinguishing what was there before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like like before you expose film and a film camera,
Speaker 1: if anyone's ever done that, you have to go into
Speaker 1: a pitch black room to do so because once you
Speaker 1: open the back of the light tight camera, when if
Speaker 1: you have that film exposed to the you know, to light,
Speaker 1: it's it's just gonna go completely dark. You're not going
Speaker 1: to be able to take any photographs with that role
Speaker 1: of film right now, Dylan, have you ever worked in
Speaker 1: the dark room? I have, yes, So what is what
Speaker 1: is it like when you are doing something like that,
Speaker 1: Like you know, the we've seen movies with the process
Speaker 1: where you've got the people with like the three or
Speaker 1: four different little basins filled with fluid and there's never
Speaker 1: any explanation of what was actually happening. It is it's
Speaker 1: an updated version of something like the GEA was doing.
Speaker 1: The chemicals are a lot less dangerous, Yeah right, we're
Speaker 1: not using mercury rap, You're a lot less likely to
Speaker 1: go crazy or catch on fire. Yes, yes, but it's
Speaker 1: a it's a process. But it's something that I think
Speaker 1: if you're interested in photography, you should. You should try
Speaker 1: the development process, um because from going into the closet
Speaker 1: to load your film, figuring out how to open something
Speaker 1: and put it in the back of the camera in
Speaker 1: Pitch Black, is is a lot of it's frustrating, but
Speaker 1: it's a lot of fun. And then you you know,
Speaker 1: even to the I don't want to get to ahead
Speaker 1: of us, but the photo the process of taking the
Speaker 1: photographs a lot different because you realize you have, like
Speaker 1: of the thirties six shots and so it's it's not
Speaker 1: like on your phone or on your digital camera, which
Speaker 1: is which is great freedom, but you think I paid
Speaker 1: I paid money for this film, and it makes you
Speaker 1: much more selective and careful. And and not only that,
Speaker 1: but I mean even that is a huge step from
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here, where taking a single image
Speaker 1: required so much effort just the not just the taking it,
Speaker 1: but the developing of that single image took so much
Speaker 1: effort that obviously the composition of your shot was really
Speaker 1: important and if you mess that up, you're talking about
Speaker 1: a day's work. In some cases, that's a lot of
Speaker 1: for one image. It's it's easy for us to forget
Speaker 1: that in the realm of selfies that we have today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'll definitely be relying upon you heavily when we
Speaker 1: start talking about manipulation in this world. But to get
Speaker 1: back to the history, just a couple more points I
Speaker 1: want to make. Uh, so we've got to air who
Speaker 1: starts solving the problem of this image immediately disappearing if
Speaker 1: you were to expose it to light by using ordinary
Speaker 1: table salt. Actually, yeah, he put it in a water solution.
Speaker 1: You got your sodium chloride solution. He would use that
Speaker 1: to dissolve the unexposed silver iodide that was left on
Speaker 1: the paper. So that way the exposed stuff had already
Speaker 1: been exposed. It's fine, you dissolve everything else, so now
Speaker 1: that stuff can't end up going dark, and you're left
Speaker 1: with your image, and you could fix it permanently because
Speaker 1: light can no longer ruin them. And uh, Eventually the
Speaker 1: Gara would find a way of producing photographs on silvered
Speaker 1: copper plate, which was kind of his his medium of
Speaker 1: choice from that point forward. Meanwhile, there was another fellow,
Speaker 1: William Henry Fox Talbot, who was working on a different
Speaker 1: approach to create photographic images of scientific observations. The reason
Speaker 1: all right, he was a scientist, not he wasn't necessarily
Speaker 1: interested in photogra if he originally he was interested in science.
Speaker 1: But he had a problem. He couldn't draw at all.
Speaker 1: He had like he would try all these sort of
Speaker 1: things so that he would just trace using a camera.
Speaker 1: Obscura didn't matter. He found himself incapable of doing that.
Speaker 1: I find myself sympathizing heavily with him. I have a
Speaker 1: distinct lack of artistic ability when it comes to that.
Speaker 1: So he wanted to find a way to preserve scientific
Speaker 1: observations exactly as they were and record them in a
Speaker 1: way that would not require him to draw in any way, shape,
Speaker 1: or fashion. So he started to look into a way
Speaker 1: to create photographic prints on paper, not using plates like
Speaker 1: the gear was using. So he used paper soaked in
Speaker 1: solutions of sodium chloride and silver nitrate in order to
Speaker 1: produce silver chloride infused paper. And if he exposed that
Speaker 1: paper to light, it would cause the exposed parts to
Speaker 1: become dark, and that would create a negative image. If
Speaker 1: he took another sheet of this and put it against
Speaker 1: the one that had been exposed, and then exposed that
Speaker 1: to light, that would create a positive image. On the
Speaker 1: second sheet, and for the first time you could get
Speaker 1: hypothetically more than one print from a picture. Yes, you
Speaker 1: were not limited to whatever the original plate was. Now
Speaker 1: you could produce multiple prints, assuming that everything stayed intact.
Speaker 1: Through this process, which was painstaking, it was still not
Speaker 1: easy to do um and in fact, there were times
Speaker 1: where it took some experimentation with this approach to get
Speaker 1: it to work just right, because often they were having
Speaker 1: quality issues with transferring the image from the negative to
Speaker 1: the the secondary sheet. And it wasn't until thirty nine
Speaker 1: that Talbot felt that he had really nailed it. He
Speaker 1: had actually talked with his friend and astronomer named Sir
Speaker 1: John herschel Uh in a way to fix the negatives
Speaker 1: using sodium thiosulfate which at the time they called sodium
Speaker 1: hypo sulfate, and found that that was what allowed it.
Speaker 1: And then then he heard about the gear and he thought, oh,
Speaker 1: because this is the era of everyone trying to get
Speaker 1: patents for things to protect their ideas so that other
Speaker 1: folks don't just run away with them. So he immediately
Speaker 1: rushes to publication to beat the French to the punch
Speaker 1: because he knew that the French publication about the Gears
Speaker 1: work was coming, so he said, well, I can't drag
Speaker 1: my feet on this and rushed ahead. Uh and this
Speaker 1: is a story we hear over and over again in technology.
Speaker 1: It's not you know. Radio was another big one like that,
Speaker 1: so television as well. So eighteen forty was the March.
Speaker 1: Eighteen forty was really when the first photography studio that
Speaker 1: we know of opened, And it was in New York
Speaker 1: City and it was it was called the Dagaron Parlor
Speaker 1: and it was operated by Alexander Woolcott. And uh so
Speaker 1: you finally had a place. It was open to the public.
Speaker 1: It was no longer these uh, the scientists, physicists, researchers
Speaker 1: and others who were all interested in this concept. Now
Speaker 1: it was something that ordinary people could have some access to,
Speaker 1: the beginning of a long road to making photography very personal. Yes,
Speaker 1: and also the birth of our era of narcissism. That's
Speaker 1: probably being unkind, uh andund Around this time you also
Speaker 1: started to see improvements in both lens design, camera design,
Speaker 1: and the chemical processes that meant that development time had
Speaker 1: decreased significantly enough where you could sit for a portrait
Speaker 1: without having to stay absolutely still for three hours, which
Speaker 1: that's good, you know. Suddenly, suddenly portraiture became more of
Speaker 1: an attainable thing for families, and it became very popular
Speaker 1: pretty early on, especially by the eighteen sixties to the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties, it became it was a huge movement at
Speaker 1: that point. And there are lots more things that happened
Speaker 1: from that point forward. Obviously, there was the development of
Speaker 1: calo type, which is a negative development process that Talbot
Speaker 1: had created that made photography on paper more practical by
Speaker 1: reducing the exposure times down to one minute. Pretty incredible
Speaker 1: at the time. Stereoscopic photography became a thing. That's when
Speaker 1: you take two images using cameras or lenses that approximate
Speaker 1: the distance of a person's eyes. One of those, oh
Speaker 1: you did, and that was very popular during the Civil War. Yes,
Speaker 1: it was exactly. Yeah, you would take you would take
Speaker 1: these two images and then you would use something called
Speaker 1: usually called a stereoscope, which was essentially a kind of
Speaker 1: a pair of glasses that held the two images at
Speaker 1: a certain distance from your eyes, so when you looked
Speaker 1: at it, it creates the illusion of depth. It's essentially
Speaker 1: a primitive three D and a lot of them you
Speaker 1: could adjust the lenses back and forth until the image
Speaker 1: came in focus for you. Right, Yeah, because of course
Speaker 1: not everyone is like our Our focal points are a
Speaker 1: little different. Uh. It's the same thing that we see
Speaker 1: now with various headsets where you have ways to adjust
Speaker 1: the lenses so that if your eyes are a little
Speaker 1: set a little further apart, are a little closer together,
Speaker 1: because a tiny difference from the average can mean you
Speaker 1: have a very different experience than someone who is closer.
Speaker 1: To the end, you can still do the exact same
Speaker 1: thing on a digital s l R through the viewfinder.
Speaker 1: Everybody can just set it up for because sometimes you'll
Speaker 1: pick up someone else's and and you're like, wow, this
Speaker 1: person has very different eyes than I do. And also
Speaker 1: you can get a very similar effect to this using Uh.
Speaker 1: There there are apps on phones now that do essentially
Speaker 1: the same thing that this is doing, only they're using
Speaker 1: the the software in an app that like a Google
Speaker 1: Cardboard is an example where you actually go and you
Speaker 1: buy a little cardboard headset and you turn your phone
Speaker 1: landscape side, you activate the Google Cardboard app, you slide
Speaker 1: it into the headset, and now you've got your own
Speaker 1: little virtual reality headset. It's based on the exact same
Speaker 1: principle as this photography. It's just in that case you're
Speaker 1: talking about more like video animation that kind of stuff
Speaker 1: rather than still photography, but it's the same idea. Then
Speaker 1: there was the wet Colodeon process, which I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'm even saying that correctly. Yes, Oh, excellent, that
Speaker 1: was used to make glass negatives and was much faster
Speaker 1: than earlier methods, provided that you were able to work quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you it it kind of birth digital. I
Speaker 1: mean not that it kind of birthed the portable dark room. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because if you had everything with you, you could do
Speaker 1: it in like fifteen minutes, that's which was incredible speed
Speaker 1: compared to the previous methods. Yeah, and you could have
Speaker 1: huge glass plates. Yeah, so you can make enormous negatives. Wow.
Speaker 1: So the challenge here is that the the method relied
Speaker 1: upon the glass retaining that that moisture on it that
Speaker 1: was used for the process, and if it dried out,
Speaker 1: then your negative was ruined. So you had to work
Speaker 1: quickly in order for you to be able to take
Speaker 1: advantage of this. But on the flip side, the process
Speaker 1: itself was very fast, So that was a big advance
Speaker 1: and then there was an even larger one a little
Speaker 1: bit later, which was the dry plate technology. I was
Speaker 1: developed by an English physician named Wretcher Richard Leech Maddox
Speaker 1: in eight seventy one UM, which eliminates some of the
Speaker 1: drawbacks of the glass approach. You didn't have to have
Speaker 1: the plate remain wet for the whole process. We'll have
Speaker 1: a bit more to talk about with photo editing and
Speaker 1: manipulation after this quick break. Early manipulation, sometimes it was
Speaker 1: again it was perfectly innocent. It might be that you
Speaker 1: take an image and you look at the negative and
Speaker 1: you realize from the net negative that there is a
Speaker 1: flaw of some sort, So you might alter the negative
Speaker 1: a little bit before creating a print so that you
Speaker 1: can compensate for some error that was made. Either the
Speaker 1: exposure wasn't quite right, the lighting wasn't quite right, or
Speaker 1: the subject moved or whatever. That may be the same
Speaker 1: thing that we do today. Yeah, So it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: a sinister or unethical uh motivation to manipulate a photo,
Speaker 1: but there are those as well. So if you look
Speaker 1: at some of the earlier edits, sometimes it meant that
Speaker 1: you would alter the negative. As I had mentioned, sometimes
Speaker 1: you would alter a print, um, in which case you might.
Speaker 1: In fact, early because we were limited to black and
Speaker 1: white photography, you had some people who would present make photographs.
Speaker 1: So make a make a print of a photograph or
Speaker 1: a negative rather and then turn it over to an
Speaker 1: artist who might actually add color by painting over the photograph.
Speaker 1: You want blue skies, you know, you a little pan
Speaker 1: on there. Yeah. Yeah, it's the best solution to the
Speaker 1: problem at the time. So that was a type of
Speaker 1: photo manipulation. I mean, it was one that everyone was
Speaker 1: aware of, but it was still a way of manipulating
Speaker 1: the photos. Uh. You could also do things like you
Speaker 1: could do a composite uh picture where that's a little
Speaker 1: bit odd. Honestly, this was one of those things that
Speaker 1: I understand the basics of, but I don't know how
Speaker 1: it would actually happen. But generally speaking, you would use
Speaker 1: two or more negatives to produce a single print, and
Speaker 1: there were a lot of composites out there for They
Speaker 1: were done for various reasons, sometimes in order to include
Speaker 1: a person who was not able to be present at
Speaker 1: a particular photo session, or to create a particular artistic feel.
Speaker 1: There's some really famous artists who composed amazing pictures using
Speaker 1: as many as fifty or more negatives in order to
Speaker 1: achieve it. And honestly, at that point, I'm like, you
Speaker 1: guys aremagish. I don't know how this works. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: as far as photo montage, photo manipulation goes, there are
Speaker 1: people like Jerry Yulesman who goes into a dark room,
Speaker 1: takes fifty negative splices them up with an exact o
Speaker 1: knife and makes a print and you you can't tell.
Speaker 1: It's like someone using photoshop in their wizard, but it's
Speaker 1: all analog. But early on you had you had Matthew Brady,
Speaker 1: who I like to think of and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people think of him this way as the
Speaker 1: first celebrity photographer who had a studio, and he took
Speaker 1: portraits of almost every politician around that period around like
Speaker 1: the Civil War era, um and he had two very
Speaker 1: famous manipulations, one that he did not do, but one
Speaker 1: of his photographs was used for part of it. I'm
Speaker 1: guessing that's the Lincoln one. The Lincoln portrait that is
Speaker 1: his it's his head, um that Matthew Brady took that photograph.
Speaker 1: It's the same one that's used on the five dollar
Speaker 1: bill exactly. And the body was of John Calhoun was
Speaker 1: Southerner entirely, and it was too. It was because during
Speaker 1: Lincoln's life they felt like they didn't have enough heroic
Speaker 1: photographs of Lincoln. Yes, this is an iconic picture of
Speaker 1: what appears to be Lincoln standing in front of a desk,
Speaker 1: and there's like an American flag in the picture, and uh,
Speaker 1: there's um, you know, it's a it's a very striking photograph,
Speaker 1: it is. And what's really interesting to me is even
Speaker 1: back then, the amount of manipulation in that photograph, Uh,
Speaker 1: that there are papers on the table, and when it
Speaker 1: was a portrait of John Calhoun, the words on the
Speaker 1: table that you could read where strict constitution, free trade,
Speaker 1: and the sovereignty of the States. But the Lincoln version
Speaker 1: says Constitution, Union and the Proclamation of Freedom. That's fascinating
Speaker 1: that they were able to get to that level of
Speaker 1: granularity in the change. And you know, there there are
Speaker 1: lots of different ways of achieving this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was the you know, you could go
Speaker 1: to the negative and you could change the negative by
Speaker 1: splicing stuff together, and then producing a print, or you
Speaker 1: could do something where you're literally cutting and pasting, but
Speaker 1: you're doing it on the print, and then you take
Speaker 1: a photograph of the print, developed that and that becomes
Speaker 1: your new photographs. So in other words, you can take
Speaker 1: two pictures and you literally cut out the image of
Speaker 1: something that you want from one, paste it over top
Speaker 1: the image that already exists, take a photo of it,
Speaker 1: develop it, and that could be a way of doing
Speaker 1: it too. That's so interesting because that's something that I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people did in elementary school, is
Speaker 1: that they went through magazines for projects and I would
Speaker 1: cut out one part and put it over another part.
Speaker 1: Is very much like collage. It's yeah, and and there
Speaker 1: was the picture Matthew Brady did of US S. S. Grant,
Speaker 1: and that's supposed to be of him in front of
Speaker 1: his troops in City Point, Virginia. Yeah, but it's not. No,
Speaker 1: it's actually three different photos all meshed together. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: it's the body of Major General Alexander M. M. Cook
Speaker 1: And uh, then it's the head of Ulysses S. Grant
Speaker 1: on top of the body. So the body is on
Speaker 1: a horse, So it's Ulysses S. Grant on the body
Speaker 1: of this other general major general, and the people in
Speaker 1: the background are not Union soldiers, their Confederate prisoners. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's it's it's that's a very interesting photo especially.
Speaker 1: I think that's an early example of UM. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say that it was meant to deceive as much, but
Speaker 1: of maybe misinformation. Yeah, you could argue, you know, you
Speaker 1: could call it propaganda if you like. It was really
Speaker 1: meant to create again, this heroic image. In fact, a
Speaker 1: lot of the pictures that for political manipulation are really
Speaker 1: about elevating a particular person to make them seem more
Speaker 1: iconic and or or eliminate things that elevated person no
Speaker 1: longer liked. Very military based for the most well, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of military ones. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's also the the General Francis P. P. Blair being
Speaker 1: added to a group of of other generals, including General Sherman.
Speaker 1: So this is a group. If you see the two
Speaker 1: different photos, you'll see one where there's a group of
Speaker 1: generals sitting together, and then the second photo there's an
Speaker 1: extra general sitting way off to the right. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was that other Matthew Brady image I was speaking of.
Speaker 1: And it's also really well done. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's he's he's definitely feels a little ostracized. But other
Speaker 1: than that, it looks like he fits it does. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe he wasn't. Maybe they felt like he wasn't as
Speaker 1: important for it was a little bit over in the corner.
Speaker 1: You're gonna go sit up the kid's table and let
Speaker 1: the adult generals talk about the war over here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it looks good. Yeah, it does look good. And
Speaker 1: that is also really interesting to me because it was
Speaker 1: clear that even early on, those photographers who are working
Speaker 1: with this medium and trying to you create these composite
Speaker 1: images or manipulate these photos in some way already had
Speaker 1: an innate understanding of if I want to do this
Speaker 1: and make it look right, lighting is really important. I
Speaker 1: can't ignore the fact that a scene lit from the
Speaker 1: left and as subject who's lit from the right that
Speaker 1: I've added in later are going to look wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they're even now. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: photos released by by very professional agencies that don't take
Speaker 1: as much of that into consideration as even some of
Speaker 1: these people a d fifty years ago, right, and those
Speaker 1: images get torn apart on Reddit. They do you can
Speaker 1: go to Reddit and you'll just see people saying, well,
Speaker 1: this is clearly photoshop because if you look at the
Speaker 1: shadows they're on the you know, blah blah blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: you can tell that the lighting is higher into the
Speaker 1: left instead of low into the right or whatever. In
Speaker 1: some cases it's really subtle and uh, and it's people
Speaker 1: who have a greater attention span and better sense of
Speaker 1: detail than idea. I'll look at it go like, holy cow,
Speaker 1: you're right, Like I didn't notice it before. But yeah,
Speaker 1: there's still some other really cool ones that I can
Speaker 1: talk about. Like in eighteen seventy, photographer William H. Mummler
Speaker 1: used double exposure. So that's another way of editing and
Speaker 1: manipulating photos that we can talk about for a second.
Speaker 1: He used double exposure to create what people have dubbed
Speaker 1: spirit photography. Now, double exposure is exactly what it sounds like.
Speaker 1: It's exposing the same whatever photographic medium, whether it's film
Speaker 1: or a plate or whatever, to light twice, so you
Speaker 1: can create kind of a double image look. And usually
Speaker 1: one of those looks kind of transparent, like a weaker
Speaker 1: image than the other one. And sometimes this was used
Speaker 1: for artistic effect like that. I saw one that was
Speaker 1: of an actor who in what in his in his
Speaker 1: regular pose the darker pose, stood very tall and dignified,
Speaker 1: and in the second post he's bent over with his
Speaker 1: hands stretched out, kind of like a like a classic
Speaker 1: universal monster. And the first thing I thought when I
Speaker 1: saw it was that's a perfect photograph if you want
Speaker 1: to get across the concept of Jekyl and hide. But
Speaker 1: that was not what the intent was from what I
Speaker 1: was reading. But as I saw it, I just thought
Speaker 1: that was the immediate reaction I had. And Uh, in
Speaker 1: this case, a mumbler used double exposures on a pretty
Speaker 1: famous person, Mary Todd Lincoln. Yes, so there's this image
Speaker 1: of Mary Todd seated and behind her is the ghostly
Speaker 1: apparition of Abraham Lincoln and he even has his hands
Speaker 1: on her shoulders and you could see through his hands
Speaker 1: to her shoulders. It's pretty effective, and it helps because
Speaker 1: he was lanky. It really does kindlish. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: again this is just achieved through double exposure. Some people
Speaker 1: do this just for artistic effect. There have been cases
Speaker 1: where people have used double exposure specifically to mislead or deceive,
Speaker 1: but in this case, I wouldn't. I would. I would
Speaker 1: argue that it wasn't necessarily meant to do that. It
Speaker 1: was more of a memorium for someone at least that's
Speaker 1: the implication. I feel. There were definitely ghost or spirit
Speaker 1: photographers who took it a different way, and we're claiming
Speaker 1: to get pictures of spirits. Yeah, like the ectoplasm uh
Speaker 1: photography as well, just that whole I mean that that
Speaker 1: gets past photography. But there are a lot of pictures
Speaker 1: with people with cheese cloths coming out of there, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: cheese cloth. That's like that's a go to for hoaxer's. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I promise when we get to we'll probably save
Speaker 1: it for post digital. But I gotta talk to you
Speaker 1: about orbs, So we'll chat about orbs in the post
Speaker 1: digital section. But I've got my favorite story of PHO. No,
Speaker 1: it's not even photo manipulation, it's just trickery. I bet
Speaker 1: it is. Does the year nineteen kind of fit into that? Fairies? Yes,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the fairies. Okay, So Dylan,
Speaker 1: you don't know this about me when I was but
Speaker 1: it's not a surprise because I was a kid once.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, Uh, and I was going
Speaker 1: to elementary school. I would check out all the books
Speaker 1: on ghosts and monsters and folklore, and I would read
Speaker 1: them cover to cover, and I would check him out again. Excellent.
Speaker 1: So I will never forget when I was reading about
Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and two young girls and a
Speaker 1: bunch of fairies out in the woods. And the two
Speaker 1: young girls were cousins or Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths,
Speaker 1: and they had all these photographs of them sitting around
Speaker 1: in Glenn's surrounded by fairies frolicking about. Yeah, the Coddingly
Speaker 1: Fairies that was taken near Coddingly, England. Famous famous hoax
Speaker 1: uh And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, the author
Speaker 1: of the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries. He was for a long
Speaker 1: time a hardcore skeptic, but then suffered some tragedy in
Speaker 1: his life and started to turn to mysticism and spiritualists
Speaker 1: in an effort to answer questions that he could not
Speaker 1: answer himself. And there was sort of a decline. It
Speaker 1: was very kind of ironic from someone who presented a
Speaker 1: character who was as dispassionate and rationalist Sherlock Holmes. To
Speaker 1: end up embracing the idea of these two girls who
Speaker 1: had managed to capture images of fairies, And it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be until near the end of their lives that they
Speaker 1: revealed that all they did was take illustrations that were
Speaker 1: from books and cut them out and paced them onto
Speaker 1: cardboard and pose the cardboard around them and take photographs.
Speaker 1: So they actually didn't do any manipulation at all. They
Speaker 1: just set a scene and did I. I think it
Speaker 1: wasn't until the late seventies or early eighties that one
Speaker 1: of them admitted to it, and then the famous skeptic
Speaker 1: James Randy also said that he was like, well, these
Speaker 1: illustrations are exactly the same as these illustrations from this
Speaker 1: book that came out in nineteen fifteen. Yeah. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: he had a book called flim Flam where he talked
Speaker 1: about it a lot. James Randy did. That was decades later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have very much later. So that's that's crazy, because
Speaker 1: they sent it that it folded a photographer named Harold Snelling,
Speaker 1: and he said quote that they were genuine, unfaked photographs
Speaker 1: of single exposure open air work show of movement and
Speaker 1: all the fairy figures and there's no trace. Whatever studio
Speaker 1: work involving card are paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Yeah, so he was. He was writing the
Speaker 1: sense there was single exposure, yes, but there was no movement.
Speaker 1: They were paper figures. In fact, there were people who's
Speaker 1: who when they really looked at the photos, they said,
Speaker 1: you can see evidence of some movement in the human subjects,
Speaker 1: but the fairies, who presumably would be moving much faster
Speaker 1: because some of them are like mid leap or flight
Speaker 1: or whatever, there's no blurring around them. And again, the
Speaker 1: exposure time at this point it was still relative a
Speaker 1: long much longer than say the cameras that would be
Speaker 1: used a few decades later, and so any fast movement
Speaker 1: would be very blurry. It wouldn't come across so sharp
Speaker 1: and crisp as these photos did. But they were very
Speaker 1: compelling at the time, and a lot of people bought
Speaker 1: into it, including Sir Arthur Knan Doyle. Uh. And I've
Speaker 1: got another one. In nineteen twenty four. We have a
Speaker 1: fellow by the name of Bernard McFadden who creates a
Speaker 1: technique called composed a graph. Do you know of McFadden,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't believe so let me take you
Speaker 1: down the lurid, dirty, dirty path to tabloid journalism, because
Speaker 1: this is tabloid journalism at its most skiezy. So here
Speaker 1: here's McFadden. He is working on a tabloid magazine called
Speaker 1: New York Evening Graphic, which some people nicknamed porno Graphic.
Speaker 1: So what he would do is there would be news
Speaker 1: stories of various uh public figures, whether celebrities, politicians, whatever,
Speaker 1: sports stars, whatever it may be, and there'd be a
Speaker 1: story of some scandal. Like again, this is a tabloid,
Speaker 1: so they're all about scandal. What he would do is
Speaker 1: he would take images, uh like of people's faces in
Speaker 1: these stories. Then he would pose um body doubles, sometimes
Speaker 1: mannequins sometimes they were staffers of the magazine into a tableau,
Speaker 1: take a picture, and then do a paste of the
Speaker 1: famous people's heads on top of the figures that he
Speaker 1: had posed, and then do things like a superimposed word
Speaker 1: balloon on top of it to express some statement that
Speaker 1: went along with the scandalous story. Wow, I mean, how
Speaker 1: could it be skisier than like today's tabloids. But that's
Speaker 1: that's that's on. That's just right there. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen have you ever seen any of
Speaker 1: the computer animated videos that come out of It's some
Speaker 1: Asian country, but it's but it's the retelling of famous story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: same principle here, except he was doing it with still photography. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And uh so that by the way, that that tabloid
Speaker 1: did not last too long. I think in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties that it folded and it went bankrupt. But
Speaker 1: um definitely was one of those means of photo manipulation
Speaker 1: that gave the whole the whole concept of bad name.
Speaker 1: So there were the political ones we had talked about previously,
Speaker 1: then there was this one where I mean it's just
Speaker 1: the beginning of a long line of commercial uses of
Speaker 1: photo manipulation and photo editing in order to sell papers. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it is what it gets down to, yeah, or or
Speaker 1: you know, to kind of cause harm to someone's image. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That that that that was the genesis of that, And
Speaker 1: that's something that every time that political campaign come around
Speaker 1: every four years, you have to be extra weary of
Speaker 1: the photographs that start uh circulating. Yeah. And and not
Speaker 1: only that, but you'll see artists will use it, usually transparently.
Speaker 1: I mean the artist approach normally is not to create
Speaker 1: an image that you think is real. The artist's intent
Speaker 1: might be to make a statement about a particular person.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing one artist who had created a photograph
Speaker 1: and it was of a crowd out on the street,
Speaker 1: and then overtop the crowd was this inky looking octopus
Speaker 1: with the head of William Randolph Hearst. So obviously the
Speaker 1: comment being that Hearst is manipulating the public through the media,
Speaker 1: and obviously he's not inky, so nor does he have
Speaker 1: eight appendages, so that makes sense. He had terrible taste
Speaker 1: in home decor. I'll say that as someone who's walked
Speaker 1: through the Hearst Castle. This was clearly a guy who
Speaker 1: had so much money. He just said, I like that thing.
Speaker 1: Put it in my else. It doesn't matter if baroque,
Speaker 1: don't care if it's If it's broken Gothic in the
Speaker 1: same room along with some even older stuff and some
Speaker 1: newer stuff, that's fine. And I who have no taste
Speaker 1: would walk through and go like, y'all, this is Tachi.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this tech stuff
Speaker 1: classic episode right after we take this break. So let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about not not adding stuff in
Speaker 1: but taking stuff away also. That became pretty prevalent around
Speaker 1: that same period of time, the nineteen twenties, that was
Speaker 1: a big period of time for well, World War One,
Speaker 1: World War two, that that kind of period in time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we had a lot of um of famous leaders who
Speaker 1: had finnicky attitudes towards their followers, and when they would
Speaker 1: get a little peeved that said followers, they would attempt
Speaker 1: to erase said followers from history entirely. Not just not
Speaker 1: just execute the person. That's not good enough. They have
Speaker 1: to erase the fact that that person ever existed, including
Speaker 1: removing them from photographs and some examples. Yeah, sometimes you
Speaker 1: get removed from a photograph and you'd also be dead. Yes,
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes they would kill you first and then say,
Speaker 1: all right, well now that he's dead, let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and remove him from all the official photographs, like press photos,
Speaker 1: things like that. Big famous example of this would be
Speaker 1: a photo that originally had Nikolai Yazkov or Yeshov rather
Speaker 1: posing with Joseph Stalin. This is the Vanishing Commissar photograph,
Speaker 1: and um it's a picture of a group of gentlemen
Speaker 1: including Mr Stalin, uh and yes Hoff and yes I'm
Speaker 1: standing right next to um a wall that leads right
Speaker 1: over to a river, and Staalin's immediately to his right,
Speaker 1: and then the retouched photo he's gone. Yeah. An example
Speaker 1: of air brushing. Yeah, air brushing exactly. So. An airbrush
Speaker 1: is a tool that uses air to push through some
Speaker 1: form of paint or ink or whatever it may be,
Speaker 1: in order for you to do some uh, you know,
Speaker 1: analog hand controlled art. And in some cases it could
Speaker 1: be to hide something that was once there. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: if you use photoshop today, it's the same idea as
Speaker 1: content to wear or the clones stamp, just to take
Speaker 1: you know, to put texture back into the photograph where
Speaker 1: something used to be right. And if you were really
Speaker 1: good at it, it might be difficult, especially on a
Speaker 1: casual glance, to notice that anything hinky has happened. There's
Speaker 1: some examples where you can look at and think, huh,
Speaker 1: if I did not know that there once was someone
Speaker 1: standing there, I never would have picked up on the
Speaker 1: fact that this photo has been altered. There are others
Speaker 1: where there might be some clues, particularly with things that
Speaker 1: have fine detail. Sometimes that will be a giveaway. There's
Speaker 1: one with Hitler that's pretty noticeable. With well technically without Gebals.
Speaker 1: It was originally Girbels was in the photograph. And I
Speaker 1: love that every instance that talks about this says, we
Speaker 1: don't know why. Yeah, we don't know why Hitler got
Speaker 1: mad at Gebels or what the reasoning was, or why
Speaker 1: he decided to erase him from this photo. He just did.
Speaker 1: And it's not done particularly well because here's a blob. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Stalin one is a little more convincing, mostly because
Speaker 1: the water in the background is a very light, like
Speaker 1: the sunlight is hitting it, so it's harder to see
Speaker 1: that there was once a form there um. But some
Speaker 1: of the other ones are a lot more obvious, by
Speaker 1: the way. The Stalin one, when I see the before
Speaker 1: and after pictures, to me, it just feels like one
Speaker 1: moment Stalin's there next to him, and the next moment,
Speaker 1: Stalin just pushes him off into the river, which somewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not that far off from the truth because he
Speaker 1: did have him executed, so uh. And I don't mean
Speaker 1: to laugh about that. I don't think it's funny, but
Speaker 1: I but it is one of those images where you
Speaker 1: just look at and you you know, it lends itself
Speaker 1: to that kind of thought. Uh and Hitler and Stalin
Speaker 1: were not the only ones to do this. Mounts a
Speaker 1: tongue did it. He had a famous photo where there
Speaker 1: was a supporter named Poku who was posed among I
Speaker 1: think they were like originally there were four people in
Speaker 1: the photograph and then three Poku was removed. Uh, Poku
Speaker 1: fell out of favor, and you can tell that this
Speaker 1: one was manipulated to there's Uh, there's a background behind
Speaker 1: where Poku was standing that has mysteriously gotten really blobby
Speaker 1: and dark, and it's not the same color as the
Speaker 1: surrounding wood in the structure that's there. So if you
Speaker 1: look at the first photo where you can see where
Speaker 1: the wood is a certain standard color all the way
Speaker 1: through up to the point where you can't see it
Speaker 1: anymore because pocus in the way and the other one
Speaker 1: looks all blobby, You're like, something's wrong. It's also weird
Speaker 1: when it's you. You see like a lineup of people
Speaker 1: and then you wonder, like why are they standing like that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Can I talk about my favorite? Sure, it's the one
Speaker 1: of Mussolini. Have you seen this one where he's on
Speaker 1: a horse and he's holding a sword up to the
Speaker 1: sky and uh. In the original there's a horse handler, yes,
Speaker 1: standing right at the very mouth of the horse hold
Speaker 1: in the horse's head, steady, and he had and removed
Speaker 1: and it's a good it's a good it's a good job.
Speaker 1: It looks it looks legitimate. But not like the artist
Speaker 1: gave the horse buck teeth or something. But just that idea, um,
Speaker 1: I think is the perfect amount of posturing for someone
Speaker 1: like that, they would definitely do something like and and
Speaker 1: that's exactly what I was saying before, with the idea
Speaker 1: that you know, to try and make certain figures seem
Speaker 1: more majestic. Uh. You know, if if you're if your
Speaker 1: identity that you are presenting to the public relies on
Speaker 1: the fact that you are this powerful figure, you don't
Speaker 1: want it seeing that you need someone there to control
Speaker 1: the horse that you're sitting on. You wanted to look
Speaker 1: like you have that, you know, that amazing ability yourself,
Speaker 1: so you don't want there to seem to be any
Speaker 1: sign of weakness perceived in any way. And that was
Speaker 1: another great example of that. Um. Did you did you
Speaker 1: know about the one from from a group of Russians
Speaker 1: who are erecting the Soviet flag above the Reichstag. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that in the original image, Uh, one of them
Speaker 1: has on two watches. Yeah, he has a band on
Speaker 1: his right arm that some people think was a watch,
Speaker 1: but it probably was actually a compass, so it probably
Speaker 1: was legitimately there. But the reason why the image is altered.
Speaker 1: If you look at the altered image, the band has
Speaker 1: gone off the right arm. And the reasoning was that
Speaker 1: if people saw that he had a band on his
Speaker 1: right arm, they would think he must already be wearing
Speaker 1: a watch on his left arm. That's where people wear
Speaker 1: their watches. So he must have been looting the bodies
Speaker 1: of the dead and put on another watch on his
Speaker 1: other arm, and they didn't want that to be part
Speaker 1: of the image. Truth is, he probably didn't loud the dead.
Speaker 1: He probably was wearing a compass on that arm and
Speaker 1: a watch on his other arm. That idea to come to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's and and it's interesting because to me, it's interesting
Speaker 1: in that they were just trying to bypass a misinterpretation
Speaker 1: of the photo and that in fact the photo was
Speaker 1: probably already not indicating that this guy was a looter.
Speaker 1: It was just well, to be safe, we should probably
Speaker 1: take that out and it's also a very small part
Speaker 1: of the photograph. Yeah, I mean it's this is not
Speaker 1: like a close up on the man's wrist, in fact
Speaker 1: that you have to look really closely to notice it.
Speaker 1: But they were concerned and so they did. And then
Speaker 1: the next one I have is actually you you mentioned him, uh,
Speaker 1: Jerry Ulsman in nineteen sixty nine, one of the most
Speaker 1: most striking photos I've seen that again was presented without
Speaker 1: it being you know, it's not meant to deceive or misrepresent.
Speaker 1: It's an artistic expression and it is this amazing photo
Speaker 1: of trees that are suspended in the air, complete with
Speaker 1: roots systems, and it's gorgeous. And if if you haven't
Speaker 1: seen his work, I would suggest looking at it because
Speaker 1: his surreal and impeccably done. Yeah, it is amazing to
Speaker 1: look at. I I was and I'm not generally speaking
Speaker 1: of visual arts kind of guy um one of my
Speaker 1: other flaws, but when I saw this, I just couldn't
Speaker 1: help but really appreciate the mastery of the art that
Speaker 1: it would take to produce such an image. It's interesting
Speaker 1: because his wife is as good at photoshop as he
Speaker 1: is in the dark room. Interesting. Yeah, we'll have to
Speaker 1: talk more about that in part two. Um, So there's
Speaker 1: some other examples we can give, Like there's there's the
Speaker 1: famous National Geographic UH cover in N two push the
Speaker 1: pyramids closer together for a better composition of yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The the original photo was done in sort of a
Speaker 1: landscape mode, and of course, in order to put it
Speaker 1: onto a cover of a magazine, they needed to be
Speaker 1: more portraits, so they squished them together. So if you
Speaker 1: look the pyramids are they appear to be geographically closer
Speaker 1: to one another than they are in reality. And some
Speaker 1: people began to criticize the magazine for saying, you're you're
Speaker 1: misrepresenting reality. You're putting this forward as if this is
Speaker 1: the way it looks, and this is not how it looks.
Speaker 1: And in fact, um they got a new director of
Speaker 1: photography who said that, um, everyone in that GEO thought
Speaker 1: that this was the wrong decision after it went up.
Speaker 1: This was a mistake, not a mistake in the sense
Speaker 1: of oops, we did this, but more like that's something
Speaker 1: that we should not do because it doesn't reflect the
Speaker 1: mission of our magazine. And so they had essentially made
Speaker 1: a statement saying we're not going to do that. Ever. Again,
Speaker 1: that's one of the last pre digital cases I can
Speaker 1: I can think of. Yeah, the most the ones I
Speaker 1: think of certainly happened after the digital era begins, like
Speaker 1: the really famous ones. Obviously there are countless examples that
Speaker 1: are out there, but that's the last one I have
Speaker 1: of the really uh, the notable ones in the pre
Speaker 1: digital era. And now there were some others that happened
Speaker 1: in the post digital era that probably still use some
Speaker 1: old school approach, like I'm thinking specifically of a TV
Speaker 1: guide car that will talk about in part two. But
Speaker 1: let me ask you this, Dylan. Have you have you,
Speaker 1: as a photographer dabbled in some of these techniques for
Speaker 1: whatever purpose almost every day? Yeah? Yeah, since I don't
Speaker 1: do photojournalism, Um, I'm not trying to do anything that
Speaker 1: I don't believe is ethical, right, Um, but let's say that,
Speaker 1: for example, here at how stuff works, I've taken photographs
Speaker 1: of the staff, and everyone's a while to take. We
Speaker 1: have these great big windows that overlook uh the street,
Speaker 1: and um, it's nice to post people and from them
Speaker 1: because there's a great light in that area. And so
Speaker 1: I'll take a portrait of one of our hosts in
Speaker 1: front of that window and then i'll upload it onto
Speaker 1: the computer. I'll realize, oh, there's some cars on the
Speaker 1: road right there. I don't want those cars right there,
Speaker 1: so you remove I remove the cars. Or I took
Speaker 1: a photograph of a couple of our hosts in front
Speaker 1: of the apartment building across the street, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: the name of the apartment building isn't part of our brand,
Speaker 1: so I should just take it out. Things like that,
Speaker 1: it's just cleaning it up. It's um and things like
Speaker 1: that I know happen every day. I think that. And
Speaker 1: now photo manipulation is probably a little bit like auto tune,
Speaker 1: where you might not know it, but almost every major
Speaker 1: release you here has at least a little bit of
Speaker 1: auto tune. Yeah, because the original purpose of auto tune
Speaker 1: was to be unnoticed. It wasn't meant to be a
Speaker 1: a new form of performance. That's how it got that's
Speaker 1: what it got turned into. And then you had people
Speaker 1: who were behind auto tune saying, well, crap. The whole
Speaker 1: purpose of this was to make make to correct little
Speaker 1: errors and get people closer to being on key and
Speaker 1: on tune without it becoming a noticeable thing. And now
Speaker 1: you guys are are are pushing this into something else,
Speaker 1: not that that isn't legitimate. I mean, I think it's
Speaker 1: always important to recognize the art sometimes takes established processes
Speaker 1: or technologies and pushes them in new ways, and that's
Speaker 1: how you get new stuff. Yeah, you get the share
Speaker 1: effect an auto tune, or you have Andy Warhol making
Speaker 1: prints until they deteriorate over and over again on like
Speaker 1: a like a screen print, over and over again. But
Speaker 1: just like how auto tune tries to find the right
Speaker 1: note between two two different notes, tries to get you
Speaker 1: to that right note. Uh, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people put their their photographs into a light room or
Speaker 1: photoshop and they just try and get it to the
Speaker 1: right exposure, the right saturation, uh, color correction, dodging and burning,
Speaker 1: which we can talk about in the second episode. Just
Speaker 1: small things like that that I think people have become
Speaker 1: so accustomed to that if you gave them an image
Speaker 1: right out of the camera, they would feel like it
Speaker 1: could have been improved upon. Yeah, this to me is
Speaker 1: really the fascinating part of this, the idea that as
Speaker 1: someone who's who's a casual shutter bug at best, like
Speaker 1: I am not known for the making great composition of shots,
Speaker 1: I take pictures casually in order to capture moments to remember,
Speaker 1: and that's about it. Like, that's that's about as far
Speaker 1: as my expertise goes in that area. I have a
Speaker 1: deep appreciation for people who have a great understanding of composition,
Speaker 1: of lighting, of what needs to happen on the camera
Speaker 1: side in order to capture the moment that you intend
Speaker 1: to capture, and only that, but what has to happen
Speaker 1: on the back end after the photo has been quote
Speaker 1: unquote taken in order for you to have the finished
Speaker 1: picture represent your vision, especially as an artist. That's that
Speaker 1: to me is amazing, Like a lot I think, I
Speaker 1: think I often would think of photography the way a
Speaker 1: lot of early photographers thought about it, that photography's purpose
Speaker 1: is to capture a moment um as close to representing
Speaker 1: it in as being real as possible, like like capturing
Speaker 1: that real moment forever and fixing it in a medium
Speaker 1: so it can stay that way for the end of time.
Speaker 1: And I don't necessarily, or at least I didn't think
Speaker 1: about the fact that sometimes the point where you push
Speaker 1: the shutter button on your camera is just the beginning,
Speaker 1: and then you have another process us that follows to
Speaker 1: get to the photo that you want that actually represents
Speaker 1: your vision. There are definitely two sides of it. I
Speaker 1: mean to have the idea of, like you said, getting
Speaker 1: a photograph, saving it for history and not touching it,
Speaker 1: I think is also very important depending on the case.
Speaker 1: It's like when you get the audio of the State
Speaker 1: of the Union, or if the President makes an address,
Speaker 1: you don't cut it because that that can change context.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't do the same thing um with photojournalism, or
Speaker 1: at least most people believe that. It's like there was
Speaker 1: a famous example in seventy at the Kent State shootings
Speaker 1: that there's a picture of a body on the ground
Speaker 1: and there's a woman grieving over it, and there was
Speaker 1: a pole sticking out from behind her head. Um, and
Speaker 1: someone saw that photograph and took the pole out. And
Speaker 1: does it change the context of the photograph? Not particularly.
Speaker 1: It was done for compositional reasons, to make it more
Speaker 1: aesthetically pleasing. One of the things that I learned when
Speaker 1: I went to college photophotography is never have a pole
Speaker 1: behind someone's head. It's just it's just you don't do it.
Speaker 1: It's distracting. And yes, but if it starts there with photojournalism,
Speaker 1: if you start by removing a pole, it could only
Speaker 1: escalate from there um and you know, you get to
Speaker 1: a point where you're like, all right, it was a
Speaker 1: pole in this case. All right, it was someone's ring
Speaker 1: in this case, which changes the context depending upon the culture,
Speaker 1: or it was you know, removing an entire person and
Speaker 1: erasing that person's presence from an actual historical moment. I mean,
Speaker 1: it does become a slope, right, And if when people
Speaker 1: find out, it raises more questions than it ever really answers, sure,
Speaker 1: because then you start questioning the motivations behind the action,
Speaker 1: and then you think, well, what are your ulterior motives
Speaker 1: for making these alterations to this photograph? And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we've explored some of that here. In some cases it
Speaker 1: was meant to mislead people specifically, in some cases it
Speaker 1: was a matter of ego, uh, and sometimes ego to
Speaker 1: the point of of megalomaniac maniake the egos I mean
Speaker 1: Stalin and and Mault s Tong and the biggest egos
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century learned mostly and yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean those are big egos and to the point
Speaker 1: where if you want someone gone you don't just kill them,
Speaker 1: but you erase all record of them. That's insane really
Speaker 1: to me. But as far as people who would have
Speaker 1: like who would have a history of having photos manipulated, yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes total sense that those would be the personalities
Speaker 1: that demand these things. And we've also, of course, there
Speaker 1: are plenty of examples of other artists and photographers who
Speaker 1: have manipulated him, just using pictures of people like those, uh,
Speaker 1: in order to lampoon or youth satire or some other
Speaker 1: means to make a message. Like there's a famous one, uh,
Speaker 1: not a particularly convincing, uh, cut and paste job, but
Speaker 1: there was one where it's a picture of of of
Speaker 1: someone dressed up with an apron and they're holding a
Speaker 1: cleaver and they're about to chop the head off of
Speaker 1: a of a bird, a bird that represents France, and
Speaker 1: they've cut and paste Hitler's head on top of the
Speaker 1: person's head, thus representing Hitler's approach to attacking and and
Speaker 1: conquering France. And it was meant as a political statement,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't meant to mislead obviously, it wasn't. It wasn't.
Speaker 1: The intent wasn't to suggest, like, look at this weird picture.
Speaker 1: I got a hitler. It was obviously to make a statement. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: so lots of different reasons for this. Now this is
Speaker 1: really neat because it does show the amount of work
Speaker 1: necessary to edit and manipulate photos. Sometimes it meant taking
Speaker 1: a risk that you might ruin the negative that you
Speaker 1: had created. Not all of these manipulations when you had
Speaker 1: to go back to the negative and make some changes, No,
Speaker 1: all of them turned out great, And there is no
Speaker 1: undo button. Yeah, so we have no way of knowing
Speaker 1: how many potentially historical images we've lost as a result
Speaker 1: of an error made in the manipulation process. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed that classic episode of tech stuff. We'll be
Speaker 1: back next week with part two. This is another one
Speaker 1: of those topics that I could easily do an update
Speaker 1: too and talk about some of the new tools for
Speaker 1: editing photos and videos and more, and how machine learning
Speaker 1: and artificial intelligence have greatly enhanced our ability to manipulate
Speaker 1: photos to the point where it's hard to trust anything
Speaker 1: you see these days in many ways. But we'll be
Speaker 1: back next week to conclude this two parter, and in
Speaker 1: the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics, I should
Speaker 1: cover on tech Stuff. Feel free to reach out to me.
Speaker 1: One way to do that is to download the i
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app. It's free to use. Just navigate over
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Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Tech Stuff is
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