The Bad and the Good of Photography One of the things I am really getting tired of is altered photos. Even with today’s abilities, some of them stick out like a sore thumb. One of the more popular ones to fake are those with giant human skeletons supposedly found in ancient tombs and such. I am not saying there haven’t been any found, because I just don’t know for sure, but I am saying the ones that are being posted on Facebook, which I see many times are fakes and yet some people give them a like. There are other photos which are of different subjects, but the idea is the same. Some of them are giant animals that have been inserted into a photo of people and it is done in such a way to make the animal look bigger than life. Yeah, I am just tired of this kind of thing, but it is a free country and if people want to do it, I guess they can. These people seem to like doing this the most with UFOs and archaeology. Yes, of course they do it with other things, like supposed paranormal photos. That particular thing has been going on since almost the invention of the camera when some unscrupulous photographers discovered double exposure. I certainly can’t blame people in that time for believing they were seeing ghosts, after all most people of that time had no idea how a camera worked. Pictures were expensive and that is why in Victorian times they would take a photo of a deceased person, because it was the only photo they had, and I imagine at least some of the families all had to chip in to afford this. There seems to me to be a big difference when photos are altered on a streaming service to try and fool people, from when it is a far more serious thing going on that has people worried and one of these photos comes out which was meant to scare people. I could never understand what fun people get out of doing that. I can only imagine what people felt the first time they saw photos of dead people. One of the first to take these photos and maybe the first was Matthew Brady. Photos were still a new medium at the time and I bet there were a lot of people who couldn’t bring themselves to look at the photos at first. An interesting fact is newspapers in America, didn’t have the technology to directly put photos into the newspapers, so what they did was make etchings, engravings or woodcuts from the photos and print them. The first photo to actually be published in a newspaper in the United States occurred on March 4, 1880 by the Daily Graphic, but we were a little behind the times because a French newspaper named L’Illustration did it in 1848. It wasn’t easy to be a photographer in the early days, and not easy for the person getting their photo taken. It is hard to imagine now, but a sitting for a photo could take several minutes to hours to get it right. The sittings were usually 3 to 15 minutes and people sometimes had to have supports to stop movement. As materials used helped with light sensitivity for the plates used, the sitting time decreased. During the Civil War Matthew Brady managed to get exposure times down to 5 to 20 seconds. This was an incredible improvement at the time. Even at that time it was impossible to capture action shots because the photo would just be a blur. When we finally got to digital photography everything changed. I have spoken about this before, but the aspect of using computers with special software to alter photos meant we could alter a photo almost any way we wanted to. At first the photos were easy to spot the areas which were inserted into a photo was sort of hazy and rough, but as time passed and more advanced computers came out, more advanced photo software was appearing. It has gotten to the point where just about anyone can alter a photo and even do it with a cell phone. Now, every once in a while, when criminals are on trial and photos are introduced by the prosecutor in evidence, the defense may state the photos are altered and force a thorough examination of the photos by an expert. Photos however are not all faked and they have been invaluable to all of us opening doors to places we would otherwise never get to see. Now that we can take video with our phones, it has opened up an entire new world for use. People can now actually create their own movies using nothing more than a cell phone. I find this idea very exciting, but I am from a much older generation which had none of this stuff, not even computers, so to people like me all this technology seems incredible. I have to wonder what people like Thomas Edison would think if he were alive today. Would he still be able to come up with new inventions in his lab, or would he not be able to get used to our state of advancement? Yet, Nikola Tesla would probably fit right in. Some of the things he was working on were so advanced, we are still waiting for them to appear. Would he have been able to bring photography further ahead? It turns out he did experiment with photography. He experimented with X-Rays, fluorescent lighting and somehow using the Tesla Coil for producing very detailed photos. He clearly was thinking far in advance of others in his time about photography. I often catch myself looking at photos and videos of my deceased loved ones and deceased friends, and their numbers keep increasing. I am so happy I have all these photos and videos, because I always want to remember what they were like and what they looked like. I never want to be the person saying I can’t remember what my wife looked like. In the days before photography this must have been a big problem for some. Now we are using photography to open up the heavens and we are beginning to see sights previously unknown to mankind. The James Webb telescope is in essence a huge camera and it is only the beginning. There will be much larger telescopes in the future and we will even get to see alien planets up close, probably before we can get to them. People born today are in for an incredible ride, and much might be connected to improved photography and video.
|
