Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art

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This year, it should come as no surprise that President-elect Donald Trump was chosen to grace the cover of Time’s annual issue (shot by Jewish photographer Nadav Kander). “For better or worse,” Trump, during his campaign and now after his election, has certainly been among the greatest influences on the events of the year. For clues as to how Time feels about that question — is it “for better or worse?” — we can look to the image chosen for the cover of the issue. The decisions that Time made regarding how to photograph Trump reveal a layered, nuanced field of references that place the image among, in this viewer’s opinion, the magazine’s greatest covers. In order to deconstruct the image, let’s focus on three key elements (leaving aside the placement of the ‘M’ in ‘Time’ that makes it look like Trump has red horns): the color, the pose, and the chair:

The Color

Notice how the colors appear slightly washed out, slightly muted, soft. The palette creates what we might call a vintage effect. ...namely, Kodachrome. Kodachrome, It was immensely popular between the late 30’s and 70s, and its distinctive look defines our common visual concept of nostalgia.

 Trump ran a campaign based on regressive policies and attitudes — anti-environmental protection, anti-abortion, pro-coal, etc.... also about traditional values (defined primarily by the Christian right), about nostalgia for American greatness and security, about nostalgia for a pre-globalized world.

The Pose

Trump’s pose can be read as a subversive play on a traditional power-portrait pose.....

The Lincoln Memorial ...We see our subject head on, ...The angle forces us to look up at the subject, which in turn creates the impression that the subject is looking down at us. This pose and angle,... makes the subject appear dominant, powerful, judging.

On the Time cover, instead of seeing Trump head on and from below, we see him seated from behind and roughly at eye level. The power relation has shifted entirely.

Trump’s turn towards the camera renders the tone conspiratorial rather than judgmental. ... By choosing not to shoot Trump head on, the Time cover almost offers us a “behind the scenes” glimpse of the man who has spent so much of his time in front of the camera..The highly posed and processed nature of the photograph offers yet another level of irony.

Finally, we must note the ominous shadow lurking on the backdrop. It’s a small, but important and clever detail. Just as this image provides us with two theoretical points of view, it also provides us with two Trumps — Trump the president-elect, and the specter of Trump the president, haunting in the wings, waiting to take form.

The Chair

The masterstroke, the single detail that completes the entire image, is the chair. Trump is seated in what looks to be a vintage “Louis XV” chair ....The chair not only suggests the blindly ostentatious reigns of the French kings just before the revolution, but also, more specifically, the reign of Louis XV who, according to historian Norman Davies, “paid more attention to hunting women and stags than to governing the country” and whose reign was marked by “debilitating stagnation,” “recurrent wars,” and “perpetual financial crisis” (sound familiar?).

...It’s a gaudy symbol of wealth and status, but if you look at the top right corner, you can see a rip in the upholstery, signifying Trump’s own cracked image. ....— the entire illusion of grandeur begins to collapse. The cover is less an image of a man in power than the freeze frame of a leader, and his country, in a state of decay. The ghostly shadow works overtime here — suggesting a splendor that has already passed, if it ever existed at all.

.... like “The Picture of Dorian Gray” suggests more than just a physical deterioration.

As a photograph, it’s a rare achievement. As a cover, it’s a statement.

Jake Romm

Rhinos with Camera Implants Fight Against Poachers

A  a UK-based non-profit named Protect created a new system for stopping poachers. Giving rhinos GPS tags, heart rate monitors, and camera implants in their horns.

Part of a system called Real-time Anti-Poaching Intelligence Device (RAPID)  embedded in its skin and horn — the camera can be installed in the horn without any  harm to the animal.






If a rhino is ever attacked by poachers the change in heart rate will alert operators at a control center. If poachers are observed in the live video feed, park authorities can be sent to the animal’s aid in a matter of minutes using the transmitted GPS coordinates. The rapid response will (hopefully) leave poachers with no time to harvest horns or escape from the scene.
An estimated 1,200+ rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa last year, which is about one killing every eight hours. It’s estimated that species of rhinos could go extinct within the next decade if nothing is done about the issue.
Protect hopes to widely deploy the RAPID over the next couple of years, and that knowledge of this new, high-tech system will deter poachers and force them to think twice before killing another rhino for its horns.


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Why Old Sports Photos Often Have a Blue Haze

Rich Clarkson’s 1968 photo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The blue haze that adds such a wonderful ambience to the arena is caused by cigarette smoke. The California Indoor Clean Air Act of 1976 was one of many regulations that started to clamp down on public smoking, and thus, we traded better light for better health. The same blue haze is evident in many historical boxing photos, like the ones made by Neil Leifer. 

This original article was written by

Allen Murabayashi

Allen Murabayashi is the Chairman and co-founder of PhotoShelter. He co-hosts the "I Love Photography" podcast on iTunes.

Here are the flaws photographers see when they take a picture of you, the job has many different demands

A professional photographer's job doesn't end after they snap their photograph, hell, in some ways that's when their job starts. In this image, The Today Show reveals what a photographer sees in his photo and what he needs to fix. And boy there is a lot that needs fixin'.

A seemingly normal photograph of the four photogenic hosts of the Today Show become shapes and circles and arrows pointing out people's flaws that must be corrected in Photoshop before its published. Whiter teeth, longer hair, bigger eyes, slimmer waist and more.

This viewpoint obviously doesn't apply to all photographers, different fields have different demands but it does speak to the culture we live in where a real photo isn't perfect until it's fake.

added a little bit in to emphasize the job has many different demands

See original article and comments here

Context is everything…

 especially when it drives an industry whose main objective is to benefit from increased profit.

your in person view of the Mona Lisa

While there is no arguing the world holds a bounty of beauty and mysteries to be explored, changing times have diminished some of the mysticism which is often displayed in photographs of ancient wonders.
Therefore, if pictures truly convey more value than words, we wonder what True Activist readers think of these famous landmarks photographed in ‘ideal’ setting, and then zoomed out

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Fukushima Isn't Mutating the Daisies

A picture of some deformed plant sex organs is alarming people all over the internet this week. The photo, taken by Twitter user @san_kaido, shows a bunch of daisies that look like conjoined twins. The accompanying tweet describes their twisted, ribbonlike appearance, and reports a radiation reading for the spot.

Given that the photo was taken in Nasushiobara City, about 80 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster site, the radiation data is probably what made news organizations across America freak out. (We wanted to ask @san_kaido more, but he wasn’t taking any more interviews). But it turns out that particular type of deformity can also be the result of a virus or insect damage, and moreover, the background radiation reported is unlikely to harm a plant.

The Word of the Day Is Fasciation

Plants grow by adding new cells at the tips of their stems from a region called the apicalmeristem. The meristem contains a reservoir of undifferentiated cells that can start new stems, leaves, or flowers; those cells are usually arranged in a tiny dome. But if a few cells in the meristem die, the dome can get flattened or curved. And that little shape change can have a huge effect on what the plant that grows out of it will look like—the plant parts growing from the distorted meristem have the same flattened and distorted shape. For the flowers in question, they look weird because they’re not growing symmetrically, and we expect our daisies to be symmetrical.

The phenomenon is called fasciation. And although it can be the result of a mutation that affects the meristem’s ability to maintain its shape, it can also be caused by anything that can simply kill off a few meristem cells: bacterial or viral infections, mechanical injury to the plant, even a heavy rain after a long drought. According to University of Massachusetts plant biologist Elsbeth Walker, it’s actually pretty easy to find plants with this condition if you’re looking for them. “If you go into any greenhouse to buy a houseplant you’ll probably find at least one–they’re a dime a dozen.” Even more likely, you’ve eaten one—strawberries sometimes fasciate into enormous fan-shaped berries.

But What About the Radiation?

Granted, mutation can cause fasciation. And that background radiation level–0.5 μSieverts/hour, according to the tweet—is certainly higher than the background levels found in other parts of Japan. But the question is whether that’s enough radiation to damage or mutate a plant, and by extension, the people near the plant.

Let’s do the math.

Sieverts (Sv) are units that are used to measure how much damage is caused by radiation absorbed by living tissue. Specifically, 1 Sv represents the effect on 1 kilogram of human tissue after it absorbs 1 joule of energy. One Sv all at once would make you sick, but we’re actually exposed to small amounts of radiation every day— from sources like cosmic rays, radon, coal power plants, and CRT monitors–and we’re perfectly capable of absorbing those low doses safely. For convenience, we typically measure these doses in microSieverts: 1μSievert (μSv) is equal to 0.000001 Sv.

Since plants can’t move, we can assume that the daisies have been growing there all season, exposed to a background radiation of 0.5 μSv each hour. That means that over the course of a day, the plant accumulates: 0.5 μSv/hour * 24 hours/day = 12 μSv/day.

And over the course of a year, it accumulates: 12 μSv/day * 365 days/year = 4380 μSv/year.

Most sources give yearly dose averages in milliSieverts (mSv), so let’s convert our units for ease of comparison: 4380 μSv/year = 4.38 mSv/year.

According to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the average American picks up a radiation dose of 6.2 mSv/year from background sources. Other sources report somewhat higher or lower values, which isn’t surprising because background radiation can vary a lot from place to place. Still, it’s undeniable that the current background exposure that those daisies are getting is lower than what you’re probably accumulating in your normal daily life. And it’s well below the maximum permitted dose for radiation workers in the United States of 50 mSv.

But what if plants are super sensitive to radiation?

Diving into the botany literature, you find that a lot of scientists in the 1950s spent their time zapping plants with X-rays and gamma rays. And it turns out fasciation is a typical plant response to damage caused by ionizing radiation. But it takes a lot of radiation to induce that damage. A 2004 review published in the Journal of Radiological Protection estimates that thesmallest radiation dose needed to change normal plant growth is about 100 μSv/hour. That’sthree orders of magnitude larger than @san_kaido’s measurement.

To be fair, Shasta daisies are perennials: It’s possible this particular plant was alive during the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent meltdown of the Fukushima plant. If so, it would have absorbed a larger dose of radiation around the time of the accident. Could that have been enough to mutate it?

Fortunately for our purposes, radiation readings from June and July of 2011 for Nasushiobara City are available on this handy Google Map. Two months after the accident, background radiation in that city was 740 nanoSv/hour. That’s the same as 0.74 μSv/hour: higher than current background readings, but still orders of magnitude less than it takes to mutate a plant.

Diane Kelly

Filed to: DEBUNKED 7/24/15 3:45pm

The Chemistry Of Fraudulent Photographs

Esther Inglis-Arkell

In the 1970s, newly-discovered pictures of “Victorian waifs” were a hit with both historians and art collectors. The chemistry seemed right. The context . . . not so much. But people only learned that too late.

In 1974, the work of Francis Hetling delighted the academic world. Hetling was a diarist and amateur photographer. He’d toured London taking photographs of Victorian orphans in Barnardo homes — homes set up in the 1870s by a philanthropic doctor, Thomas Barnardo. Although poor children were fashionable subjects for photographs, the Victorians liked their waif tableaux staged. Well-to-do children were given fake rags and often put in rural settings. Seeing what actual poor children looked like was an opportunity.

Of course, experts checked it out. The “photographs” were actually “calotypes,” or “talbotypes.” This added to the plausibility of the story. These types of images were an innovation in photographic technology. People had known for hundreds of years that certain preparations of silver would discolor when exposed to the light, and that this could be combined with a camera obscura to create images. The problem was making the images dark enough, detailed enough, and permanent enough. Many photographic methods in the 1870s required that people stayed put for up to an hour at a time, and some required heavy and delicate glass plates.

Calotypes shorted the process to a couple of minutes, and required a sheet of prepared paper. Essentially, the piece of paper would be prepared with potassium iodide and silver nitrate — both light sensitive — and then stored for as long as the photographer liked. At the last minute, before the photograph was taken, it got washed in a solution of more silver nitrate and gallic acid. It could be exposed for as little as ten seconds, but usually more like a minute or two, depending on the light. The paper had no visible image on it. It was only later, by repeatedly washing it with more silver nitrate and gallic acid that a negative became visible. Once the photographer fixed the negative, they could then press this negative against a paper that had more traditional chemicals in it, and expose the image for as long as they liked. The final image would have at least traces of the chemicals used in the calotype process in it. The Hetling images did, although investigators could not be absolutely certain.

So it wasn’t the chemistry that caught “Francis Hetling.” It was a man who recognized the eleven-year-old daughter of a guy he knew. The girl turned out to have had her picture taken by Howard Grey, and man who worked in advertising and knew that nostalgia sold well. He staged pictures of Victorian waifs, and then gave them to Graham Ovendon, an artist who knew how to fake a photograph. The two weren’t exposed until 1978.

Looking back on the disaster, some art critics have found fault with one particular photo. We can see that it’s a poignant photo, and one that casts doubt as to the ethics of the photographer. A child in rags throws her hand in front of her face, ashamed to have her picture taken. But poor children of that time wouldn’t have had a concept of the notoriety or permanence that photographs could bring. More importantly, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that there is too much motion in the photograph for it to have been taken at the time. It appears to be a quick, improvised gesture. The girl would have had to have frozen in that position for at least ten seconds, and possibly more like a minute or two, given the low light around her.

Grey and Ovendon were tried for fraud in 1980, but not convicted. The photographs, some of which had hung in the National Portrait Gallery, were taken down.

Top Image: Los Angeles County Museum of Art

[Sources: Camera Clues, The Calotype Process, Francis Hetling’s Victorian Waifs.]

Transforming Ordinary Office Employees into Super Athletes Without Photoshop Trickery

 

They may look like fitness models, but they aren’t.
They’re everyday people — office workers, programmers and mothers who took the chance to try something they had never done before.

Liz, Mother of 3

People often look up to the superstars in magazines, marveling at how amazing they look without realizing that they too can look the same.
Armed with $20,000 of lighting equipment and a homemade rain machine, I wanted to prove to them how amazing they looked, straight out of camera.

Chris, 61 year old grandfather of 12

Great Lighting. No Photoshop.

“Hollywood-level lighting” makes a huge difference.
Once set up properly, anyone can look absolutely phenomenal straight out of camera. Muscles beautifully defined, faces perfectly lit.
No tummy tucking or Photoshop funny business needed, only the small tweaks: light, contrast & colour.

Stephanie, 24 year old Front Office Executive

Hours of Trial and Error

Great results take time. And time is money.
We took 2,000 shots in a single day in order to produce fewer than 20 final photographs. Each person had to try out a variety of different poses before even beginning to perfect the one that worked.

Shandrew, 37 year old — Director of operations

It starts with believing in yourself

Good lighting and great equipment is only a small part of making people look their best.
Getting them to believe how amazing they looked, was the true magic ingredient behind the creation of these shots.
Watch them transform in front of your eyes:

Toni, 62 year old grandma

This year, give yourself the gift of self-confidence.

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About the author: Benjamin Von Wong is a photographer based out of Montreal, Canada. Visit his website here. This article originally appeared here.

Blue dresses and color

 Why That Dress Looks Blue And Black, And White And Gold

The internet was a twitter a while back of a strange photo and amazingly it did change as I was editing it. Your eyes can play tricks in mind blowing ways. Your eyes change and adjust to slight changes in lighting. Screens refresh have different calibrations. Even the angle you look at your screen can change the color of this dress. below is a catchup for those who haven't seen it.

guys please help me - is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the fuck outSo I just looked at this like, it’s blue and black obviously and all my friends were like no it’s blue and gold. Now I’m super confused, what is eyesight?

I see it as white and gold. My friend right here sees it as blue and black. I CANT HANDLE THISif that’s not gold my entire life has been a lie

I am seeing Blue and Black, how are people seeing it different? Is there some sort of mind sorcery happening here?! :o

Okay, wtf
i just saw it as gold and white which was weird bc earlier it was blue and black so i thought maybe ye were fucking with me but i went to reblog and now its blue and black again?!1?
 I AM GOING TO CRY

My class just had a debate over this. Half sees black and blue, the other half sees gold and white. Someone please explain this…

SPREAD THIS UNTIL IT REACHES NASA WE MUST FIND ANSWERS

Update: this thing changed color in front of my face. How does that even happen.

There is a survey in what color people think it is

The official online listing says it's blue and black

the photo — taken with a camera phone in poor lighting — casts the whites in a blue tone and mutes the gold to a darker color.People who see blue and black are seeing the photo at face value. People who see gold and white are compensating to the photo’s lighting and aesthetic.

Here’s the dress with the blue-toned light taken out — a little color correction 

 

 

 

 

 

But then again, you can correct the photo in other ways 

and come to an entirely different conclusion.

 

This brings up the conversation of color perseption Until relatively recently in human history, "blue" didn't exist.
As the delightful Radiolab episode "Colors" describes, ancient languages didn't have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there's evidence that they may not have seen it at all.  Read more here

Blue is also rarely found in nature as a color medium Flowers, minerals etc. Blue things are one of the more valuable items because of rarity. 

25 Years of Beautiful, Fake Images Brought to You By Photoshop

by Matt Novak

 

Happy birthday Photoshop! You might be turning 25 this week, but you don't look a day over 20. (We suspect you've had some photoshopping done.)

It's no secret that Adobe Photoshop didn't invent image manipulation. People have been dramatically altering photos since the invention of photography itself. But Photoshop pushed image tinkering into the digital age, and much like other tools of the digital revolution, helped bring photo fakery to the masses.

Below we look back at just a few of the photoshops (yes, it's a generic term now, whether Adobe likes it or not) that would become famous and infamous.

Reading is fundamental

Does anything look fishy about this image of President George W. Bush? His book might be upside down, but that's all thanks to a little Photoshop trickery.

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CCTV cameras outside George Orwell's house

Is that really a CCTV outside George Orwell's famous house? No, it's not. It's from a series of photoshopped works by artist Steve Ullathorne.

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Computer of the future from 1957

This "computer of the future" which purports to be from the 1950s is too good to be true. Back in 2007 Fark hosted a photoshop contest, and thanks to the magic of the internet, this one quickly went viral. The only problem? People were soon passing it off as real.

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Supermoon

1

Like so many supermoon photos, this one is a fake. I'm no moonologist, but if the moon was really that big on any given night I'm pretty sure we'd all be dead by now. Because tides or something.

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Putin bunny ears

This photo of Putin-pal Steven Seagal giving bunny ears spread far and wide on social media. And yes, Seagal is buddies with Putin. But those fingers are fake. Certainly makes you wonder what the sly look is all about though.

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9-11 Guy

Of all the early 2000s photoshops to go viral, "9-11 guy" is one that sticks out in my mind as particularly shocking. You can tell almost immediately that it was fake, given the bad timestamp. But 9-11 was still so fresh in everyone's minds that the fact anyone would make such a thing was pretty damn shocking. The original story most commonly attached to this photo? It was found on some undeveloped film in the wreckage of the Twin Towers.

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Underwater train

There are so many photoshops that are simply too good to fact-check. And this "underwater train" is one of them. We wanted to believe that real life was like Harry Potter movie or something. Too bad it's a fake.

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Obama smoking

Election season brings out the photoshops like none other. And, as you can imagine, Obama got more than his fair share of photoshops in both 2008 and 2012. The one that's most interesting is perhaps the most plausible. Obama has been an occasional smoker and struggled to quit. But this photo of him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth is fake.

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Buddha carved in stone

You may have seen this remarkable image of "Buddha" carved in stone. Too bad it's a total fake, created by internet artists. I talked with the creator last year and when I asked about his images that were "clearly photoshopped" he shot back that to him they were all "clearly photoshopped." The photoshopness is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

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Northern Lights

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Which brings us to the gif at the top of this post. As you can see, it's not the Northern Lights of Alaska. The background is actually a panoramic image of the Orion Nebula, taken from the Hubble telescope. Well done, for sure! But totally fake.

So what's your favorite Photoshop of all time? Did any of these fool you when you first saw them?

Video Series Walks Through the Major Photographic Processes Used Throughout History

Back in 2012, the George Eastman House made a series of six videos showing the six photo processes used in the history of photography. Now  George Eastman House has re-released those six videos alongside six new ones. From the Daguerreotype all the way up through digital photography.
Here is the first in the series. Click the link for the entire list of 12 videos.

 

See More Here

The Magic Starts Here: Kenji’s Workshop of Camera Wizardry

enji Yamaguchi’s shop could be mistaken for Sid’s workbench from Toy Story, a place where mangled lenses and broken shutters crowd out bare areas of his workspace. His office is tucked away in the basement of National Geographic, behind a grease-covered floor filled with drill presses and electric saws. Surrounded by robotic motors, modified macro lenses, and custom flashes, Kenji builds contraptions that can’t be bought. When a photographer needs to fasten a camera onto a thirty-foot pole to capture a bird in her nest, or build a wide-angle macro lense to identify pollen on a flower with mountains in the background, he’ll call Kenji

VIDEO: Visit Kenji’s workshop and meet the man behind the gear
He is particularly fond of his custom motion-detecting flashes, or what he calls “camera traps.” In the wild, cheetahs like to chew on the rubber-coated cable that connects the camera to its flash. Kenji solved this problem by incorporating a wireless flash. As a result, photographers are able to illuminate wildlife without distraction. The first time I meet Kenji, he was cranking out flash units—just like a one-man production line.
Kenji has been integral to projects worldwide. One of his favorite experiences occurred a few hours away from his native Tokyo when he helped underwater photographer David Doubilet with a month-long assignment in Suruga Bay, Japan. His main challenge was getting two scenes on one frame (a double exposure). Kenji’s role was to load the film and help capture the images in a single, seamless photo.

A bifocal view captures the robot Searover in the little explored waters of Suruga Bay off of Honshu Island in Japan.
Photograph by David Doubilet

Launch Gallery

The photographic team used one piece of film to create two different images. First they exposed the lower half of the negative underwater, then expose the upper half above water several days later.
Over the course of this project I’ve developed a profound respect for the people who manage and maintain our photographic tools. During our interview, I asked Kenji about his motivation. He said that he continually asks himself, “What can I do to make this device better?”
*****
See how National Geographic photographer Steve Winter uses camera traps built by Kenji to photograph big cats.
A native West Virginian, David Ehrenberg found his love for video storytelling in a high-school production class. After four months as National Geographic magazine’s multimedia apprentice, he is currently working as a video coordinator with the digital video team at National Geographic Studios. Outside of work, he enjoys backpacking, kayaking, and trout fishing. Follow David on Instagram.