More lies from CBS

Hall of Shame

Protect your property by all means, but lie about it?

Hot on the heels of my piece on digital tampering by the news media comes the not-so startling revelation that the people at CBS are at it again.

This time, the purpose of their lies is innocent if no less damnable, namely protecting the image of their $15mm a year teleprompter reader, one Katie Couric.

A picture being worth a thousand words or 15 lbs of fat, I will let the following photograph do my talking for me. Guess which one CBS used in promoting Ms. Couric?

In the same way that they tried suing gun makers for murders committed with their weapons, doubtless that scum bag class known as tort lawyers will be suing Adobe/Photoshop any day now for making it possible to trim off all that fat. The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, as Wilde once said of fox hunting.

Always carry …. a sound recorder?

QTVR, Sound

A new twist on an old saying.

Which of us has not heard “Always carry a camera”? The exhortation is rarely informed, of course. Any Englishman will tell you that it never rains when you carry an umbrella, and for most, the same applies to cameras. You never see good pictures if you just happen to have one along for the ride. Good pictures are made, not found.

However, just to put a new twist on it, how about “Always carry a sound recorder”?

This past weekend I was with our four year old at a local park and, as is the case with kids, Winston made straight for the play area. This, you must understand, is fenced. Not to keep anyone out but rather to keep all those threats to society, little children, in. And no, this was not in the Bronx or Brixton. The reality, I suspect, is that one of the city councilmen just happened to have a relative in the fencing business and …. well, you know how the rest of it goes.

Well, Winnie was struggling with the latch to the gate so I gave him a hand, only to be met with the most appalling squeaking as the gate opened. Payola for the gate oiling program must have been missed this year, I suppose. But the emotion I felt most was one of excitement. This was a fantastic sound effect! So I whipped out the Edirol sound recorder (from its newly acquired 99 cent canvas case found at Target – Roland being too cheap to supply one) and had at it with the gate, much to Win’s amusement. We whanged the gate back and forth a few times and had a jolly old time doing it, I must say. Creepy! Adults like funky sounds too!

I had already added wind howl sounds to the Piedras Blancas motel QTVR picture but this project just called out for a creaky gate sound to complete the feeling of desolation. It was a moment’s work in Audacity to superimpose the squeaky gate on the wind howl and then to parcel the whole thing up in CubicConnector.

Here’s how the sound tracks look in Audacity – the wind howl is at the top. Subequently I copied and pasted the squeaky gate to match the length of the wind howl then told CubicConnector to loop the whole thing:

Now I’m not about to lug the Canon 5D/KingPano head/Linhof tripod with me wherever I go, in the search of new panoramas. But the Edirol may just make the trip.

* * * * *

A few words about this old motel. It has been on Highway One, close to Hearst Castle for as long as I remember. Back when I first saw it on my inaugural drive up the most beautiful road in California – that would have been 1979 or so – it was replete with gas pumps and was a hive of activity. A half decent restaurant and those same jolly white and electric blue colors. Then over the years it began to fail. Nothing wrong with the location, just lousy management and marketing. Finally, last year, the State of California bought it for an obscene amount of taxpayers’ money and promised to convert it to an educational institution, whatever that means. After all, this is the state that made America’s best public schooling system into the worst in a short twenty years, so it’s not as if they can claim to know anything about the subject.

A year later what you see is what is in my picture. A couple of old paint buckets sit outside the deserted main entrance. Weeds grow everywhere. The gas pumps are long gone and a couple of abandoned cars soil the parking lot. It’s an incredibly sad scene. Desuetude and detritus in this otherwise pristine area, with a brown State of California sign ‘Closed for Restoration’ tacked by the doorway. That’s a sign that needs to be posted on the Capitol in Sacramento.

Keld rediscovered

Photographers

The Great Dane is back.

I first learned of the sparse, severe work of Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen from early issues of Leica Fotografie magazine from the 1950s. His focus on carefully composed details of ships, ropes, man made items for the most part, was appealing for its clarity of vision and very sparing use of color. It has aged a lot better than Danish furniture.

While ‘lifestyle’ magazines leave me cold for the most part – why would you pay for marketing after all? – there’s one that is head and shoulders above the others. Indeed, as the only way to get it is to be the registered owner of one of their products, its hardly marketing at all. After all, you have already paid up. And the best thing about their products is that no one will know what you have. If you like gauche Rolexes, look elsewhere. That magazine is put out by the makers of one of the very few mechanical items more lovely to behold than an early M Leica. It is called Patek Philippe and I urge you to get a Patek if for no other reason than to enjoy the publication:

Most noteworthy in its editorial policy is the frequent focus on art and photography. The currrent issue (Volume 11, Number 7) has, in its large pages, superb portolios of the work of Don McCullin (of Viet Nam war photography fame) and Keld Helmer-Petersen. An equally fascinating article looks at modern makers of sundials. Add substantive pieces on French sculptor Camille Claudel and Francois Junot, a Swiss maker of mechanical objects (see the cover, above), and you have content not likely to be found in the pages of some nouveau riche-targeted hack job put out by ‘luxury’ car makers extolling the virtues of their plastic upholstery and the latest in internal decorating.

While Keld-Helmer Petersen made his living as a commercial photographer, it’s his 1948 book ‘122 Colour Photographs’, which I am lucky to have in the library at home, that made him famous. When everyone was working in monochrome, he turned to color because, in his words “You have to think of colour as form….”. It helps that the interview is conducted by a famous photographer, the Englishman Martin Parr, so it is neither banal nor trite.

It looks as if his ‘rediscovery’ may encourage Petersen to publish again and I urge you to place the book on your short list.

And just in case you fall for Patek’s tag line “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after if for the next generation”, let me disabuse you of that belief. The reality is that it’s like owning a rangefinder Leica, meaning a cleaning and overhaul every five years at horrendous cost. These are intensely mechanical devices, after all. The next generation had better hope I don’t go belly up if it wants mine (the Patek, not the Leicas; I’m selling the latter). Leicas get obsoleted. Pateks do not.

The best $140 you will ever spend

Photography

Lacie’s 250gB Porsche hard drive.

It’s fifty years since IBM shipped the first computer hard disk drive. Its platters were some 24″ in diameter and it weighed one ton, requiring delivery by fork lift. There were 24 disks in the pack and you can see them here:

It stored 4.4 megabytes. Suffice it to say that only fat bankers could afford them for an annual lease payment of $35,000, or $400,000 in today’s money.

When asked why they didn’t increase the capacity for another three years, IBM responded that Marketing had concluded that there was no way they could sell something larger, as no one would ever need it….

Today that drive woud not store one photograph taken on a Canon 5D digital camera. My iPod stores almost fourteen thousand times as much data.

You can buy Lacie’s 250gB desktop hard drive for $140 from Lacie. Products from other reputable manufacturer’s abound – I mention Lacie because it works for me, comes in fast Firewire for use with Macs and is almost bearable to look at. You don’t need a fork lift to install it. And you will sleep well at night knowing everything is backed up. If Apple’s contention that only 4% of users back-up daily is correct, chances are you are one of those who does not. And with all photographs being digital nowadays (even film users have to scan their originals for printing or back-up) those originals are simply too precious to lose.

And don’t wait for Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard, with its built in back-up functions, to ship next spring. Buy good back-up software like SuperDuper! now. Want to bet that you will not crash over the next two quarters? There are other products but Lacie’s Silverkeeper (now ‘1-Click’) has never worked for me and my copy of Dantz’s Retrospect not only failed all the time (and Dantz could not/would not help), the software was written by someone with a grasp of English comparable to that enjoyed by the Hispanic laborers who pick the grapes every year in my vineyard.

Storage is cheap. Good pictures are not.

Digital tampering

Photography

Science in the service of truth.

I wrote recently of the need to Be sceptical in the face of a dishonest press corps with questionable ethics, illustrating the piece with the crudely altered pictures taken by a schmuck with a political agenda working for Reuters.

Well, someone has decided to apply science to the process of uncovering digital fakes, and more can be found in this excellent web site. That someone is a member of the Dartmouth faculty (though I recognize that’s no guarantee of integrity) named Hany Farid and he is to be commended for his work. It’s instructive to realize that the many illustrations on his site of tampered ‘news’ pictures are from across the political spectrum and academia. No party or ideology, it seems, is above blame ot guilt. Anyway, Dr. Farid sounds like the real thing – check out his research papers to get an idea of how he goes about the discovery process. Here’s someone applying a forensic approach to photographic crime, which seems entirely appropriate.

Some digital camera makers are now beginning to offer ‘original digital signatures’ as part of the information stored with digital images. Sounds like these should become required equipment for the staffs of major magazines.

True, cheating is as old as the world – Farid’s examples amusingly include Lincoln’s head on another politician’s body (as if Lincoln needed any help!) – but it’s nice to read that someone is trying to institutionalize the process of discovery using mathematical techniques. Nor does he restrict his work to still pictures, for he addresses video fakes (no, not newscasters, but that’s pretty close – that’s a subset that should see elimination of humans, replaced with inexpensive cyborgs, with no loss to viewers and considerable financial savings to the networks) in one of his papers.