csua.org/u/gmk -> theshapeofdays.com/2006/08/adnan_hajj_isnt_even_trying_anymore.html
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Adnan Hajj isn't even trying anymore Adnan Hajj is a prolific photojournalist -- and I'm using that term loosely here -- for Reuters who came under some pretty intense criticism in the wake of the recent incident at Qana in Lebanon.
a somber photo credited to Hajj appeared on the Reuters news wire showing a Lebanese rescue worker removing the body of a child from the rubble of a collapsed building.
Both Hajj and Frayer had other photos of the same rescue worker and child on their respective wires that day, photos taken at widely divergent times ranging from 12:45 pm Eastern to 4:30 pm Eastern. Now, the fact that these photos appear to have been taken over a span of nearly four hours isn't necessarily damning. Timestamps can be recorded erroneously, editorial assistants can mis-type information when submitting photo to the wire service. There are a lot of ways in which this seemingly bizarre sequence of photos could have ended up being distributed to news outlets around the world. But the whole situation contributed to some very skeptical attitudes on the part of a lot of folks who look at the press critically these days. Were these photographers actually recording the events as they took place? Or was the body of a child being paraded in front of the cameras all afternoon in an attempt by one party or another to influence public opinion? And if the photos were staged, why the hell were these photographers -- these journalists -- letting themselves be used that way? It made for a lot of thought-provoking talk, but nothing conclusive came of it. It was just another example of the fog of war in the real-time age. But tonight, as far as I'm concerned, all the benefit of the doubt is gone.
a photograph on the Reuters wire that purports to show "smoke billowing from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs." Except the smoke has been so obviously and incompetently retouched that I'm amazed Hajj ever believed he could get away with it.
See the repeating patterns in the smoke in the top third of the picture, the way it looks textured in a regular way? The fact that Treasury has, in the past, issued two-dollar bills really isn't relevant tot his conversation. For your comfort and safety, please feel free to substitute whatever you want in place of the last three words of that sentence. Adobe Photoshop has a tool that pretty much all artists and photographers adore and revile in equal proportion. It's called the clone stamp tool, and basically what it lets you do is take pixels from over there and put them over here. Used wisely it's a good tool for, for example, airbrushing out specks of dust or scratches on film. But no matter how a Photoshop newbie might be tempted by it, it is not a good tool to use for replicating large areas of a photograph. Because all you can do is take a piece of the picture and reproduce it someplace else, it's very easy to introduce subtle patterns into a photo, especially in the background, that the eye can pick up on. If somebody overuses the clone stamp tool, you won't necessarily be able to pinpoint exactly what the problem is, but you'll know something is off. By all appearances, it looks like Adnan Hajj used the clone stamp tool about sixty-three zillion times to paint more smoke into the sky above Beirut. There are a couple other peculiarities in the photo that jump out to my eye, including a couple of conspicuously similar patterns of pixels -- that's "buildings" to you non-geek types out there -- in the lower left. But I spent a few minutes zoomed in real tight and couldn't be sure that I was seeing something artificial. Frankly, compared to the unbelieveably clumsy work in the sky, the retouching in the lower left -- if that's indeed what it is -- is incongruously subtle. So I'm willing to pass that off as two similar-looking buildings in downtown Beirut for now. The sky is such a dead giveaway, I'm frankly shocked that this photo ever made it out onto the wire at all.
"Allah" from Hot Air have all weighed in with their opinions. Some of the other bloggers have taken a closer look at that bottom-left quadrant of the photo I mentioned, and come to the conclusion that yeah, that's been retouched too. I find their analysis persuasive, but I have to wonder: If Adnan Hajj could make that part of the photo look at least superficially genuine, how could he screw up the rest of the picture so horribly? Update #2 A reader e-mailed to ask what I was talking about with respect to the patterns-in-the-smoke stuff up above. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to explain it, so I'll just show you what I mean instead.
See how the same pattern repeats itself nine times on the right side of the picture? That's because I swiped across it with the clone stamp tool, just painting in the same pattern of pixels to fill in the right side of the photo. It's careless, and it's phony, and it's obviously careless and phony.
Charles thinks this photo is a retouched version of an entirely different picture taken by another photographer. Seems more likely to me that it was just taken from the same vantage point. Again, if the photographer (or whomever) could do such a great job of airbrushing the bottom half, why did he do such a terrible job up top? I think it's more likely he started with a photo showing some smoke over some buildings, and wanted more smoke.
Death and destruction aren't funny at all, even when the death and destruction in question are entirely the products of a twisted Internet blogger person. I, on the other hand, am already going straight to hell, so it doesn't really matter if I giggle a bit on the way down.
Digg, and that one of the people who left a comment there said that it's all gonna come down to how Reuters responds. Of course, Digg is a site where just anybody can sign up to leave a comment, which means you also get to see things like this: "I can't stand the nerve of Israelis to accuse someone of adding smoke to a picture when they already killed hundreds of innocent civilians. Is it just me, or is that just "fake but accurate" wrapped up in a new set of clothes? Folks, I hate to break this to you, but it really doesn't matter very much now what happened in Beirut. Now the story is that a photojournalist -- or his editor, or whomever it turns out to be -- faked a photo, and that Reuters ran it on their wire. Once you start just making stuff up, the argument is over. Very few things in this life can be reduced to objective truth. But deciding whether it was good or bad, whether it was okay or not, that's a value judgment. And most folks have a deep-seated resistance to being persuaded by people who lie.
But it doesn't look like the new photo is an unedited version of the original photo. Instead, it looks like the two pictures were taken seconds, or even fractions of a second, apart. I superimposed the pictures in Photoshop and found that not only do they cover slightly different fields of view, they also were taken at different angles.
The result of all this is that it doesn't seem to be possible to extract the difference between the photos to highlight precisely what portions were retouched. Normally if you retouch a photo and then superimpose it on top of the original, you can subtract the two pictures from each other -- literally, like with math. The result is entirely black except for the parts of the photo you retouched. Here's the difference matte between the retouched photo and the original.
But even after I carefully superimposed the two Reuters pictures, the difference matte I got was not useful, due in no small part to the fact that, if these are two different crops of the same photo, one's been color-corrected differently from the other.
It looks like Adnan Hajj -- or somebody -- copied the entire foreground of the photo and pasted it in, maybe in a clumsy attempt to extend the cityscape and make the photo more (profitable) dramatic. Just to see what happened, I pu...
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