Do photos mean as much anymore?

X

xxloverxx

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I vaguely remember a time when a photo could be used as proof for something (e.g. I was there, I did this, here's a photo of the receipt — I'm not lying!).

But I think that now, with photo editing getting to the level that it is (just look at how much you can do in Adobe CS5 —*(content aware fill, content aware resizing, distortion corrections, almost anything you'd ever want to do), do photos have the same power?

I remember, about 10 years ago, and I don't know if this goes with any of your experiences, if you had a photo, you had solid evidence for something and there was very little doubt about it. Now? If I show a photo that seems unlikely to any of my non-photog friends, most of them would claim that it'd been edited, or “photoshopped”, as they say…:bang:
 
There are enough examples of photo manipulation in history. I think russians where good in that because they often had to remove people off official photos because they vanished somehow. So nothing new. Now it's probably easier than ever to manipulate. We don't hear this so often so I think it's not a real problem today.
 
tom.w.bn said:
There are enough examples of photo manipulation in history. I think russians where good in that because they often had to remove people off official photos because they vanished somehow. So nothing new. Now it's probably easier than ever to manipulate. We don't hear this so often so I think it's not a real problem today.
Click to expand...

totally agree, the notion that "seeing is NOT believing" is a modern concept is ignoring this. there is also a whole load of software options out there to "seek the truth" from a DNG.
 
It was so much better in the old days, back then you knew that Alien or Three Head Goat Boy on the cover of the National Inquire was real and not something some one created in photoshop.
 
I don't think that the real danger is that a single photo is manipulated. The far bigger danger is that whole stories are manipulated. In such a case it doesn't matter which medium a photographer uses. He takes a manipulated photo right when he presses the shutter.

@Juan: you can't resist to emphasize everywhere that film is better, right?
 
tom.w.bn said:
I don't think that the real danger is that a single photo is manipulated. The far bigger danger is that whole stories are manipulated. In such a case it doesn't matter which medium a photographer uses. He takes a manipulated photo right when he presses the shutter.

@Juan: you can't resist to emphasize everywhere that film is better, right?
Click to expand...

Tom, you made me smile! I didn't post for that reason, I swear!

Cheers,

Juan
 
photos have always been nothing but facsimile representations of reality as seen by the photographer, always having strong element of elements of both interpretation and falsification inherent in them. the possibilities of both are simply greater now. photographs never reported the "truth" exactly; now that is certainly more the case than ever before. the mere act of how we chose to frame a shot or crop an image is an alteration. obviously things like photoshop and HDR are far more so. if you ever "trusted" photographs as "truth" you were taking a risk. the risk is higher now.
 
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