Pics that Lie

This is a picture of the San Antonio skyline that I doctored to include the image of two F-22 Raptors that went rogue and bombed downtown. I even included an explosion near the center of the image. It's small in the blog so you will have to click on it. I chose this picture because I wanted to make a scene that depicted a disaster. I wanted to pick a scene that everyone recognized. Since we all live in San Antonio I figured it would be a good starting point. I found this image on Google. I liked it because it was during the day and you could have a clear visual of any disaster that happened during the day. Then I started thinking of disasters and I remembered San Antonio houses an Air Force base. So I came up with the idea of a rogue squadron bombing downtown.

I manipulated the imaged by first taking the F-22 raptor image and taking the jets from it and put them into the skyline with a separate layer. Because they are moving I added a motion blur to them to add an aspect of realism. Then I found the explosion on Google and cropped the image from the original and put it into the skyline as well. I lightened up the explosion a little bit and added a bit of a blur to it because it is a far away explosion and adds the effect of movement.

The manipulation that I created could certainly be harmful. It's a picture of an explosion in downtown San Antonio. If someone, perhaps a journalist, saw the image and thought that it was real, could create a completely artificial story around the image whether it is true or not. Then, people in San Antonio would read the article and think that the Air Force base near the city was unsafe and their lives were in danger. So yes, I would say that this type of manipulation is certainly harmful because this sort of thing does not happen.

Quote From The Article
"One new check on science images, though, is the blogosphere. As more papers are published in open-access journals, an informal group of watchdogs has emerged online."

This is completely true. Not only for science images but any doctored image that is thrown around on the internet like a baseball. Billions of people use the internet and there's a good chance someone has seen the original image of a doctored image and there is also a good chance that those same people have seen the doctored image itself. The problem is that they will notice this and post about it on a blog just like this one. One website I frequent is Digg.com which houses serious and humorous news articles, images, videos, etc. I can click on a funny image, then go to the comment section, and more often than not there will be a comment posted by a random person showing that the image is fake with a link to the original. Thanks to the internet, if you doctor an image and throw it on public domain, someone will figure it out and point it out.