September 30, 2022 • 61 mins
HowStuffWorks photo editor Dylan joins the show to talk about the pre-digital age of photo manipulation. Learn about airbrushing, composite photos, double exposure and more!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
John Than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio
and how the tech area. It's time for a classic
episode of tech Stuff. This episode is titled Photo Editing
and Manipulation Art one, So I guess you can probably
(00:30):
make an educated guess about what next week's classic episode
is going to be. This episode originally published on August
thirty one, two thousand fifteen. Dylan, who at the time
was sort of working in our our social media and
marketing areas, was a guest host on this one. Now
Dylan is a managing executive producer with I Heart, So
(00:52):
the dude is a superstar at I Heart really is
an incredible person, does incredible work. By way back then,
Dylan was fairly new and uh so I decided to
show in the ropes and have them on to talk
about manipulating photos online for fun and profit. Enjoy. Dylan
(01:13):
has generously offered up some of his precious time to
jump into the studio to talk about photo manipulation and
photo editing. So this is going to be a two
part podcast. We know that starting off, we're gonna concentrate
on sort of the pre digital era for this first episode,
and then our next one will be kind of the
(01:33):
various techniques and motivations behind photo manipulation and the post
digital era where we're no longer talking necessarily about physical
media but lots of zeros and ones instead. But the
the interesting thing to me is that photo manipulation has
been around almost as long as photography has, and in
(01:57):
large part because of the limitation of photography, especially the
early days, it was kind of seen early on as Okay, well,
we have the foundation down, now how do we make
up for all the things that we can't do at
least yet. You know, you don't know in their mind
if they knew that was going to be a possibility
in the future, but um, it kind of gave them
(02:20):
the ability to add to a photo what cameras were
not able to do at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, those
early cameras were incredibly limited. And uh, you know, it
helps if we take kind of a step back and
look at a little bit of history. And by a
little bit of history, I mean I've created a timeline
(02:41):
to kind of walk us through the early development no
pun intended. Okay, no, that was definitely a pun intended
of photography. So before we get to any photography at all,
before we get to the point where we're recording light
onto some medium, we can talk a little bit about
the camera obscura, which was not necessarily about recording recording images,
(03:04):
but more about projecting them. Yes, and this is ancient technology.
I mean, when you think about it, the basic technology
was a dark chamber or room through which you have
a hole in one wall and then you can project
across the on the opposite wall. Yeah, and uh, what
you saw on the opposite wall would be correct in perspective,
(03:28):
but it would be eight degrees rotating hundred degrees. It
would be upside down. Yeah. So I I have often
seen this used as a way for artists who wanted
to do a big wall mural. For example, they would
have an image on one side, so it would be
projected large on the opposite where they could actually trace
things out, although not all artists were very capable of
(03:51):
doing this, and it wouldn't be until the Renaissance. Like
even though the technology itself was thousands of years old,
in the sense that the ancient Chinese and Greek we're
using the sort of yeah, it really does. It's always
like it's always like, well, you have you got to
look to the Middle East and you gotta look to
China for some of these amazing developments that took a
long time to make their way to the Western world.
(04:13):
But in the Renaissance, there was an Italian writer named
Gia Batista de la Porta who was really the first
to use a lens arrangement in camera scarre. So it
was more than just the simple hole or a mirror.
It was a lens. And uh, that's where we started
really calling it camera obscura. And then you move ahead
(04:35):
about a hundred two hundred years to seventy seven, and
that's when a gentleman by the name of Johann Heinrich
Schulz uh noticed something really odd. In fact, it was
something that other people had noticed, but he was the
one who actually put two and two together. We're talking
silver salts here. Now, silver salts, when exposed to light, uh,
(04:59):
get darker. And this is a major part of early photography.
But for a long time people thought that it was
heat that made the salts turn dark. Now, what Schultz
did was he had an experiment where he he had
essentially a surface covered in silver salts, and he put
(05:20):
a covering over it so that he could spell out
a word in the silver salt and then expose that
to light, and it made those salts turn dark. So
he actually could spell out words using light this way,
but he didn't have any way of preserving it. There's
no way for him to keep this so that it
would permanently have this word. In fact, as soon as
you remove the covering and the rest of the salts
(05:43):
are exposed to light, everything turns dark. So it's like
you have a temporary image. It's kind of like the
Snapchat of its day. Yeah, that a very very kind
of simple snapchat where someone would have to be in
there with you and be like, all right, you're gonna
have to look at this right now, because as soon
as I turn on the light, this sucker, it's it's
(06:06):
it's time. Will be very limited a latent image. Um yeah,
in a way that like if you see something very
bright and you close your eyes, right there it is. Yeah,
So it wouldn't be until the eighteen twenties. That's when
a fellow by the name of Anissa four Neepsie thank
you for pronouncing that that's a guess, my French jump.
(06:28):
Papa francis bien malorism So I am not very good
with the French pronunciation. I haven't had French since high school,
so I apologize for butchering the name. But he developed
a technique to use light in order to make copies
of engravings. And what he would do is he would
take it engraving and covered in oil and then he
(06:50):
would put the engraving on a plate that was coated
with a combination of lavender oil and vitamin of Judea,
which is a light sensitive material. And yeah, and he
had the first successful image in eighteen sixteen. Yeah, amazing, right,
Like he was able to use this and he called
the process heliography, meaning from the sun to right, so
(07:14):
it was close to photography, but he was calling it heliography.
By eighteen twenty six he was using that process on
lots of stuff like lithographic stone, on glass, on zinc,
and on pewter plates. And in eight he used a
camera obscura computer plate to produce a photograph from nature.
It was an image of the courtyard of his estate.
It was taken from an upstairs balcony and over the
(07:37):
course of eight hours. Yes, it took a number of hours. Yeah,
that was the real issue where with these early approaches
is that they had not perfected the chemistry necessary to
have this reaction of light that would affect chemicals in
such a way as to preserve an image. What's really
funny is that the lens technology was much farther ahead
(07:58):
from the start than the chemist street and a lot
of early photography was really only limited by the chemicals involved. Right, Yeah,
so you would end up having these super long exposure
times in the in some cases it meant that the
the image you produced is otherworldly because in the case
of this one with a courtyard, the lights coming from
(08:21):
the sun, and it's over the course of eight hours,
which reads, the sun starts in the east and ends
in the west, So in the finished image you have
light from the sun shining from both directions. It's as if,
you know, obviously, we don't live in a world where
you can really do that in a in an instant.
You would have to have this long exposure time in
order to achieve that, so kind of a special effect
(08:43):
just by the very limitation of the media itself. Yeah,
the exposure time is early on would would make things,
like you said, look very otherworldly. And it was just
because it was out of necessity, that's what they had. Yeah,
they didn't have any option really like, it wasn't like
it had nothing to do with shutter speed or any
of the other stuff we talked about with cameras. It
(09:03):
had specifically to do with the limitation of the materials,
the chemicals they were using. By eighteen thirty three, that's
when we first start seeing the term photograph being used. Uh.
And in fact, it was apparently coined by a fellow
named Hercules Florence or Hercule floren if you want to
(09:25):
be fancy. Uh. He coined the term, using it to
describe a process in which he used paper with silver
salts to produce prints of drawings. However, his work actually
largely took place in Brazil, and because Brazil was so
far removed from all the other areas that we're looking
into this mostly in Europe, his work remained largely unknown
(09:47):
until the nineteen seventies. And I would like to notice
is his really interesting work. It's something to look into.
He had some nice photographs. Yeah. Yeah, And and our
next fellow who made a big impression on photography is
one that probably most people have heard, at least heard
the technology named after him. That would be uh, Louis Jacquemond,
(10:12):
the gear type. Yeah. So he used the camera obscura
in a plate of iodized silver, which would allow him
to create a latent image of a scene. That's what
Dylan was talking about just a minute ago. And he
found that if you expose that plate to mercury vapor,
the exposed parts of the image, the ones that had
been exposed to light, would become visible, so it would develop.
(10:38):
This is where we start talking about developing photographs, and
that approach reduced the exposure times needed eventually from eight
hours down to around half an hour ish um using
this particular approach, But there was a drawback. If the
developed picture was exposed to light, like after you've taken it,
then the unexposed areas of silver would continue to darken
(10:58):
and eventually the image would become impossible to see. Dylan
and I will be back in just a moment to
talk more about photo editing and manipulation after these messages.
Imagine that you have a photograph in your hand and
(11:19):
you take it out anywhere where there's light, and it
would just gradually become a dark picture, like there will
be no no, no way of distinguishing what was there before. Yeah,
Like like before you expose film and a film camera,
if anyone's ever done that, you have to go into
a pitch black room to do so because once you
open the back of the light tight camera, when if
(11:41):
you have that film exposed to the you know, to light,
it's it's just gonna go completely dark. You're not going
to be able to take any photographs with that role
of film right now, Dylan, have you ever worked in
the dark room? I have, yes, So what is what
is it like when you are doing something like that,
Like you know, the we've seen movies with the process
where you've got the people with like the three or
(12:03):
four different little basins filled with fluid and there's never
any explanation of what was actually happening. It is it's
an updated version of something like the GEA was doing.
The chemicals are a lot less dangerous, Yeah right, we're
not using mercury rap, You're a lot less likely to
go crazy or catch on fire. Yes, yes, but it's
(12:25):
a it's a process. But it's something that I think
if you're interested in photography, you should. You should try
the development process, um because from going into the closet
to load your film, figuring out how to open something
and put it in the back of the camera in
Pitch Black, is is a lot of it's frustrating, but
(12:48):
it's a lot of fun. And then you you know,
even to the I don't want to get to ahead
of us, but the photo the process of taking the
photographs a lot different because you realize you have, like
of the thirties six shots and so it's it's not
like on your phone or on your digital camera, which
is which is great freedom, but you think I paid
(13:10):
I paid money for this film, and it makes you
much more selective and careful. And and not only that,
but I mean even that is a huge step from
what we're talking about here, where taking a single image
required so much effort just the not just the taking it,
but the developing of that single image took so much
(13:30):
effort that obviously the composition of your shot was really
important and if you mess that up, you're talking about
a day's work. In some cases, that's a lot of
for one image. It's it's easy for us to forget
that in the realm of selfies that we have today. Yeah,
so I'll definitely be relying upon you heavily when we
(13:51):
start talking about manipulation in this world. But to get
back to the history, just a couple more points I
want to make. Uh, so we've got to air who
starts solving the problem of this image immediately disappearing if
you were to expose it to light by using ordinary
table salt. Actually, yeah, he put it in a water solution.
(14:12):
You got your sodium chloride solution. He would use that
to dissolve the unexposed silver iodide that was left on
the paper. So that way the exposed stuff had already
been exposed. It's fine, you dissolve everything else, so now
that stuff can't end up going dark, and you're left
with your image, and you could fix it permanently because
(14:32):
light can no longer ruin them. And uh, Eventually the
Gara would find a way of producing photographs on silvered
copper plate, which was kind of his his medium of
choice from that point forward. Meanwhile, there was another fellow,
William Henry Fox Talbot, who was working on a different
approach to create photographic images of scientific observations. The reason
(14:56):
all right, he was a scientist, not he wasn't necessarily
interested in photogra if he originally he was interested in science.
But he had a problem. He couldn't draw at all.
He had like he would try all these sort of
things so that he would just trace using a camera.
Obscura didn't matter. He found himself incapable of doing that.
(15:16):
I find myself sympathizing heavily with him. I have a
distinct lack of artistic ability when it comes to that.
So he wanted to find a way to preserve scientific
observations exactly as they were and record them in a
way that would not require him to draw in any way, shape,
or fashion. So he started to look into a way
(15:38):
to create photographic prints on paper, not using plates like
the gear was using. So he used paper soaked in
solutions of sodium chloride and silver nitrate in order to
produce silver chloride infused paper. And if he exposed that
paper to light, it would cause the exposed parts to
become dark, and that would create a negative image. If
(15:59):
he took another sheet of this and put it against
the one that had been exposed, and then exposed that
to light, that would create a positive image. On the
second sheet, and for the first time you could get
hypothetically more than one print from a picture. Yes, you
were not limited to whatever the original plate was. Now
you could produce multiple prints, assuming that everything stayed intact.
(16:23):
Through this process, which was painstaking, it was still not
easy to do um and in fact, there were times
where it took some experimentation with this approach to get
it to work just right, because often they were having
quality issues with transferring the image from the negative to
the the secondary sheet. And it wasn't until thirty nine
(16:46):
that Talbot felt that he had really nailed it. He
had actually talked with his friend and astronomer named Sir
John herschel Uh in a way to fix the negatives
using sodium thiosulfate which at the time they called sodium
hypo sulfate, and found that that was what allowed it.
And then then he heard about the gear and he thought, oh,
because this is the era of everyone trying to get
(17:08):
patents for things to protect their ideas so that other
folks don't just run away with them. So he immediately
rushes to publication to beat the French to the punch
because he knew that the French publication about the Gears
work was coming, so he said, well, I can't drag
my feet on this and rushed ahead. Uh and this
is a story we hear over and over again in technology.
(17:30):
It's not you know. Radio was another big one like that,
so television as well. So eighteen forty was the March.
Eighteen forty was really when the first photography studio that
we know of opened, And it was in New York
City and it was it was called the Dagaron Parlor
(17:53):
and it was operated by Alexander Woolcott. And uh so
you finally had a place. It was open to the public.
It was no longer these uh, the scientists, physicists, researchers
and others who were all interested in this concept. Now
it was something that ordinary people could have some access to,
(18:14):
the beginning of a long road to making photography very personal. Yes,
and also the birth of our era of narcissism. That's
probably being unkind, uh andund Around this time you also
started to see improvements in both lens design, camera design,
(18:34):
and the chemical processes that meant that development time had
decreased significantly enough where you could sit for a portrait
without having to stay absolutely still for three hours, which
that's good, you know. Suddenly, suddenly portraiture became more of
an attainable thing for families, and it became very popular
(18:57):
pretty early on, especially by the eighteen sixties to the
eighteen eighties, it became it was a huge movement at
that point. And there are lots more things that happened
from that point forward. Obviously, there was the development of
calo type, which is a negative development process that Talbot
had created that made photography on paper more practical by
(19:18):
reducing the exposure times down to one minute. Pretty incredible
at the time. Stereoscopic photography became a thing. That's when
you take two images using cameras or lenses that approximate
the distance of a person's eyes. One of those, oh
you did, and that was very popular during the Civil War. Yes,
(19:38):
it was exactly. Yeah, you would take you would take
these two images and then you would use something called
usually called a stereoscope, which was essentially a kind of
a pair of glasses that held the two images at
a certain distance from your eyes, so when you looked
at it, it creates the illusion of depth. It's essentially
a primitive three D and a lot of them you
could adjust the lenses back and forth until the image
(20:02):
came in focus for you. Right, Yeah, because of course
not everyone is like our Our focal points are a
little different. Uh. It's the same thing that we see
now with various headsets where you have ways to adjust
the lenses so that if your eyes are a little
set a little further apart, are a little closer together,
because a tiny difference from the average can mean you
(20:24):
have a very different experience than someone who is closer.
To the end, you can still do the exact same
thing on a digital s l R through the viewfinder.
Everybody can just set it up for because sometimes you'll
pick up someone else's and and you're like, wow, this
person has very different eyes than I do. And also
you can get a very similar effect to this using Uh.
(20:44):
There there are apps on phones now that do essentially
the same thing that this is doing, only they're using
the the software in an app that like a Google
Cardboard is an example where you actually go and you
buy a little cardboard headset and you turn your phone
landscape side, you activate the Google Cardboard app, you slide
(21:06):
it into the headset, and now you've got your own
little virtual reality headset. It's based on the exact same
principle as this photography. It's just in that case you're
talking about more like video animation that kind of stuff
rather than still photography, but it's the same idea. Then
there was the wet Colodeon process, which I don't know
if I'm even saying that correctly. Yes, Oh, excellent, that
(21:26):
was used to make glass negatives and was much faster
than earlier methods, provided that you were able to work quickly. Yeah,
I mean you it it kind of birth digital. I
mean not that it kind of birthed the portable dark room. Yeah,
because if you had everything with you, you could do
it in like fifteen minutes, that's which was incredible speed
(21:47):
compared to the previous methods. Yeah, and you could have
huge glass plates. Yeah, so you can make enormous negatives. Wow.
So the challenge here is that the the method relied
upon the glass retaining that that moisture on it that
was used for the process, and if it dried out,
(22:08):
then your negative was ruined. So you had to work
quickly in order for you to be able to take
advantage of this. But on the flip side, the process
itself was very fast, So that was a big advance
and then there was an even larger one a little
bit later, which was the dry plate technology. I was
developed by an English physician named Wretcher Richard Leech Maddox
(22:28):
in eight seventy one UM, which eliminates some of the
drawbacks of the glass approach. You didn't have to have
the plate remain wet for the whole process. We'll have
a bit more to talk about with photo editing and
manipulation after this quick break. Early manipulation, sometimes it was
(22:54):
again it was perfectly innocent. It might be that you
take an image and you look at the negative and
you realize from the net negative that there is a
flaw of some sort, So you might alter the negative
a little bit before creating a print so that you
can compensate for some error that was made. Either the
exposure wasn't quite right, the lighting wasn't quite right, or
(23:14):
the subject moved or whatever. That may be the same
thing that we do today. Yeah, So it's not necessarily
a sinister or unethical uh motivation to manipulate a photo,
but there are those as well. So if you look
at some of the earlier edits, sometimes it meant that
(23:34):
you would alter the negative. As I had mentioned, sometimes
you would alter a print, um, in which case you might.
In fact, early because we were limited to black and
white photography, you had some people who would present make photographs.
So make a make a print of a photograph or
a negative rather and then turn it over to an
artist who might actually add color by painting over the photograph.
(23:57):
You want blue skies, you know, you a little pan
on there. Yeah. Yeah, it's the best solution to the
problem at the time. So that was a type of
photo manipulation. I mean, it was one that everyone was
aware of, but it was still a way of manipulating
the photos. Uh. You could also do things like you
could do a composite uh picture where that's a little
(24:19):
bit odd. Honestly, this was one of those things that
I understand the basics of, but I don't know how
it would actually happen. But generally speaking, you would use
two or more negatives to produce a single print, and
there were a lot of composites out there for They
were done for various reasons, sometimes in order to include
(24:40):
a person who was not able to be present at
a particular photo session, or to create a particular artistic feel.
There's some really famous artists who composed amazing pictures using
as many as fifty or more negatives in order to
achieve it. And honestly, at that point, I'm like, you
guys aremagish. I don't know how this works. Yeah, I mean,
(25:02):
as far as photo montage, photo manipulation goes, there are
people like Jerry Yulesman who goes into a dark room,
takes fifty negative splices them up with an exact o
knife and makes a print and you you can't tell.
It's like someone using photoshop in their wizard, but it's
all analog. But early on you had you had Matthew Brady,
(25:22):
who I like to think of and I think a
lot of people think of him this way as the
first celebrity photographer who had a studio, and he took
portraits of almost every politician around that period around like
the Civil War era, um and he had two very
famous manipulations, one that he did not do, but one
(25:43):
of his photographs was used for part of it. I'm
guessing that's the Lincoln one. The Lincoln portrait that is
his it's his head, um that Matthew Brady took that photograph.
It's the same one that's used on the five dollar
bill exactly. And the body was of John Calhoun was
Southerner entirely, and it was too. It was because during
(26:06):
Lincoln's life they felt like they didn't have enough heroic
photographs of Lincoln. Yes, this is an iconic picture of
what appears to be Lincoln standing in front of a desk,
and there's like an American flag in the picture, and uh,
there's um, you know, it's a it's a very striking photograph,
it is. And what's really interesting to me is even
(26:29):
back then, the amount of manipulation in that photograph, Uh,
that there are papers on the table, and when it
was a portrait of John Calhoun, the words on the
table that you could read where strict constitution, free trade,
and the sovereignty of the States. But the Lincoln version
says Constitution, Union and the Proclamation of Freedom. That's fascinating
(26:55):
that they were able to get to that level of
granularity in the change. And you know, there there are
lots of different ways of achieving this sort of stuff.
I mean, there was the you know, you could go
to the negative and you could change the negative by
splicing stuff together, and then producing a print, or you
could do something where you're literally cutting and pasting, but
you're doing it on the print, and then you take
(27:16):
a photograph of the print, developed that and that becomes
your new photographs. So in other words, you can take
two pictures and you literally cut out the image of
something that you want from one, paste it over top
the image that already exists, take a photo of it,
develop it, and that could be a way of doing
it too. That's so interesting because that's something that I
(27:37):
think a lot of people did in elementary school, is
that they went through magazines for projects and I would
cut out one part and put it over another part.
Is very much like collage. It's yeah, and and there
was the picture Matthew Brady did of US S. S. Grant,
and that's supposed to be of him in front of
his troops in City Point, Virginia. Yeah, but it's not. No,
(27:57):
it's actually three different photos all meshed together. Uh. It's
it's the body of Major General Alexander M. M. Cook
And uh, then it's the head of Ulysses S. Grant
on top of the body. So the body is on
a horse, So it's Ulysses S. Grant on the body
of this other general major general, and the people in
(28:19):
the background are not Union soldiers, their Confederate prisoners. Yeah,
so it's it's it's that's a very interesting photo especially.
I think that's an early example of UM. I wouldn't
say that it was meant to deceive as much, but
of maybe misinformation. Yeah, you could argue, you know, you
could call it propaganda if you like. It was really
(28:41):
meant to create again, this heroic image. In fact, a
lot of the pictures that for political manipulation are really
about elevating a particular person to make them seem more
iconic and or or eliminate things that elevated person no
longer liked. Very military based for the most well, yeah,
(29:02):
a lot of a lot of military ones. Uh. Yeah.
There's also the the General Francis P. P. Blair being
added to a group of of other generals, including General Sherman.
So this is a group. If you see the two
different photos, you'll see one where there's a group of
generals sitting together, and then the second photo there's an
(29:23):
extra general sitting way off to the right. Yeah, that
was that other Matthew Brady image I was speaking of.
And it's also really well done. Yeah, yeah, I mean
it's he's he's definitely feels a little ostracized. But other
than that, it looks like he fits it does. Yeah,
maybe he wasn't. Maybe they felt like he wasn't as
important for it was a little bit over in the corner.
(29:44):
You're gonna go sit up the kid's table and let
the adult generals talk about the war over here. Yeah,
but it looks good. Yeah, it does look good. And
that is also really interesting to me because it was
clear that even early on, those photographers who are working
with this medium and trying to you create these composite
images or manipulate these photos in some way already had
(30:05):
an innate understanding of if I want to do this
and make it look right, lighting is really important. I
can't ignore the fact that a scene lit from the
left and as subject who's lit from the right that
I've added in later are going to look wrong. Yeah,
I mean they're even now. There are a lot of
photos released by by very professional agencies that don't take
(30:30):
as much of that into consideration as even some of
these people a d fifty years ago, right, and those
images get torn apart on Reddit. They do you can
go to Reddit and you'll just see people saying, well,
this is clearly photoshop because if you look at the
shadows they're on the you know, blah blah blah blah blah,
you can tell that the lighting is higher into the
left instead of low into the right or whatever. In
(30:50):
some cases it's really subtle and uh, and it's people
who have a greater attention span and better sense of
detail than idea. I'll look at it go like, holy cow,
you're right, Like I didn't notice it before. But yeah,
there's still some other really cool ones that I can
talk about. Like in eighteen seventy, photographer William H. Mummler
used double exposure. So that's another way of editing and
(31:13):
manipulating photos that we can talk about for a second.
He used double exposure to create what people have dubbed
spirit photography. Now, double exposure is exactly what it sounds like.
It's exposing the same whatever photographic medium, whether it's film
or a plate or whatever, to light twice, so you
can create kind of a double image look. And usually
(31:35):
one of those looks kind of transparent, like a weaker
image than the other one. And sometimes this was used
for artistic effect like that. I saw one that was
of an actor who in what in his in his
regular pose the darker pose, stood very tall and dignified,
and in the second post he's bent over with his
hands stretched out, kind of like a like a classic
(31:56):
universal monster. And the first thing I thought when I
saw it was that's a perfect photograph if you want
to get across the concept of Jekyl and hide. But
that was not what the intent was from what I
was reading. But as I saw it, I just thought
that was the immediate reaction I had. And Uh, in
this case, a mumbler used double exposures on a pretty
(32:16):
famous person, Mary Todd Lincoln. Yes, so there's this image
of Mary Todd seated and behind her is the ghostly
apparition of Abraham Lincoln and he even has his hands
on her shoulders and you could see through his hands
to her shoulders. It's pretty effective, and it helps because
he was lanky. It really does kindlish. Yeah, and and
(32:39):
again this is just achieved through double exposure. Some people
do this just for artistic effect. There have been cases
where people have used double exposure specifically to mislead or deceive,
but in this case, I wouldn't. I would. I would
argue that it wasn't necessarily meant to do that. It
was more of a memorium for someone at least that's
(33:00):
the implication. I feel. There were definitely ghost or spirit
photographers who took it a different way, and we're claiming
to get pictures of spirits. Yeah, like the ectoplasm uh
photography as well, just that whole I mean that that
gets past photography. But there are a lot of pictures
with people with cheese cloths coming out of there, right, yeah,
(33:23):
cheese cloth. That's like that's a go to for hoaxer's. Um. Yeah,
And I promise when we get to we'll probably save
it for post digital. But I gotta talk to you
about orbs, So we'll chat about orbs in the post
digital section. But I've got my favorite story of PHO. No,
it's not even photo manipulation, it's just trickery. I bet
(33:46):
it is. Does the year nineteen kind of fit into that? Fairies? Yes,
we're going to talk about the fairies. Okay, So Dylan,
you don't know this about me when I was but
it's not a surprise because I was a kid once.
When I was a kid, Uh, and I was going
to elementary school. I would check out all the books
(34:07):
on ghosts and monsters and folklore, and I would read
them cover to cover, and I would check him out again. Excellent.
So I will never forget when I was reading about
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and two young girls and a
bunch of fairies out in the woods. And the two
young girls were cousins or Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths,
(34:31):
and they had all these photographs of them sitting around
in Glenn's surrounded by fairies frolicking about. Yeah, the Coddingly
Fairies that was taken near Coddingly, England. Famous famous hoax
uh And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, the author
of the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries. He was for a long
(34:53):
time a hardcore skeptic, but then suffered some tragedy in
his life and started to turn to mysticism and spiritualists
in an effort to answer questions that he could not
answer himself. And there was sort of a decline. It
was very kind of ironic from someone who presented a
character who was as dispassionate and rationalist Sherlock Holmes. To
(35:17):
end up embracing the idea of these two girls who
had managed to capture images of fairies, And it wouldn't
be until near the end of their lives that they
revealed that all they did was take illustrations that were
from books and cut them out and paced them onto
cardboard and pose the cardboard around them and take photographs.
(35:39):
So they actually didn't do any manipulation at all. They
just set a scene and did I. I think it
wasn't until the late seventies or early eighties that one
of them admitted to it, and then the famous skeptic
James Randy also said that he was like, well, these
illustrations are exactly the same as these illustrations from this
(36:01):
book that came out in nineteen fifteen. Yeah. Yeah, he
he had a book called flim Flam where he talked
about it a lot. James Randy did. That was decades later. Yeah,
you have very much later. So that's that's crazy, because
they sent it that it folded a photographer named Harold Snelling,
and he said quote that they were genuine, unfaked photographs
(36:22):
of single exposure open air work show of movement and
all the fairy figures and there's no trace. Whatever studio
work involving card are paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures,
et cetera. Yeah, so he was. He was writing the
sense there was single exposure, yes, but there was no movement.
They were paper figures. In fact, there were people who's
who when they really looked at the photos, they said,
(36:44):
you can see evidence of some movement in the human subjects,
but the fairies, who presumably would be moving much faster
because some of them are like mid leap or flight
or whatever, there's no blurring around them. And again, the
exposure time at this point it was still relative a
long much longer than say the cameras that would be
used a few decades later, and so any fast movement
(37:06):
would be very blurry. It wouldn't come across so sharp
and crisp as these photos did. But they were very
compelling at the time, and a lot of people bought
into it, including Sir Arthur Knan Doyle. Uh. And I've
got another one. In nineteen twenty four. We have a
fellow by the name of Bernard McFadden who creates a
technique called composed a graph. Do you know of McFadden,
(37:28):
I don't. I don't believe so let me take you
down the lurid, dirty, dirty path to tabloid journalism, because
this is tabloid journalism at its most skiezy. So here
here's McFadden. He is working on a tabloid magazine called
(37:49):
New York Evening Graphic, which some people nicknamed porno Graphic.
So what he would do is there would be news
stories of various uh public figures, whether celebrities, politicians, whatever,
sports stars, whatever it may be, and there'd be a
(38:09):
story of some scandal. Like again, this is a tabloid,
so they're all about scandal. What he would do is
he would take images, uh like of people's faces in
these stories. Then he would pose um body doubles, sometimes
mannequins sometimes they were staffers of the magazine into a tableau,
(38:29):
take a picture, and then do a paste of the
famous people's heads on top of the figures that he
had posed, and then do things like a superimposed word
balloon on top of it to express some statement that
went along with the scandalous story. Wow, I mean, how
(38:51):
could it be skisier than like today's tabloids. But that's
that's that's on. That's just right there. I don't know
if you've ever seen have you ever seen any of
the computer animated videos that come out of It's some
Asian country, but it's but it's the retelling of famous story. Yeah,
same principle here, except he was doing it with still photography. Yeah.
(39:13):
And uh so that by the way, that that tabloid
did not last too long. I think in the early
nineteen thirties that it folded and it went bankrupt. But
um definitely was one of those means of photo manipulation
that gave the whole the whole concept of bad name.
So there were the political ones we had talked about previously,
(39:34):
then there was this one where I mean it's just
the beginning of a long line of commercial uses of
photo manipulation and photo editing in order to sell papers. Essentially,
it is what it gets down to, yeah, or or
you know, to kind of cause harm to someone's image. Yeah.
That that that that was the genesis of that, And
(39:55):
that's something that every time that political campaign come around
every four years, you have to be extra weary of
the photographs that start uh circulating. Yeah. And and not
only that, but you'll see artists will use it, usually transparently.
I mean the artist approach normally is not to create
(40:16):
an image that you think is real. The artist's intent
might be to make a statement about a particular person.
I remember seeing one artist who had created a photograph
and it was of a crowd out on the street,
and then overtop the crowd was this inky looking octopus
with the head of William Randolph Hearst. So obviously the
(40:38):
comment being that Hearst is manipulating the public through the media,
and obviously he's not inky, so nor does he have
eight appendages, so that makes sense. He had terrible taste
in home decor. I'll say that as someone who's walked
through the Hearst Castle. This was clearly a guy who
had so much money. He just said, I like that thing.
(40:59):
Put it in my else. It doesn't matter if baroque,
don't care if it's If it's broken Gothic in the
same room along with some even older stuff and some
newer stuff, that's fine. And I who have no taste
would walk through and go like, y'all, this is Tachi.
Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this tech stuff
(41:20):
classic episode right after we take this break. So let's
talk a little bit about not not adding stuff in
but taking stuff away also. That became pretty prevalent around
(41:42):
that same period of time, the nineteen twenties, that was
a big period of time for well, World War One,
World War two, that that kind of period in time. Yeah,
we had a lot of um of famous leaders who
had finnicky attitudes towards their followers, and when they would
(42:03):
get a little peeved that said followers, they would attempt
to erase said followers from history entirely. Not just not
just execute the person. That's not good enough. They have
to erase the fact that that person ever existed, including
removing them from photographs and some examples. Yeah, sometimes you
get removed from a photograph and you'd also be dead. Yes,
(42:24):
sometimes sometimes they would kill you first and then say,
all right, well now that he's dead, let's go ahead
and remove him from all the official photographs, like press photos,
things like that. Big famous example of this would be
a photo that originally had Nikolai Yazkov or Yeshov rather
posing with Joseph Stalin. This is the Vanishing Commissar photograph,
(42:50):
and um it's a picture of a group of gentlemen
including Mr Stalin, uh and yes Hoff and yes I'm
standing right next to um a wall that leads right
over to a river, and Staalin's immediately to his right,
and then the retouched photo he's gone. Yeah. An example
(43:11):
of air brushing. Yeah, air brushing exactly. So. An airbrush
is a tool that uses air to push through some
form of paint or ink or whatever it may be,
in order for you to do some uh, you know,
analog hand controlled art. And in some cases it could
be to hide something that was once there. Yeah, Like
(43:33):
if you use photoshop today, it's the same idea as
content to wear or the clones stamp, just to take
you know, to put texture back into the photograph where
something used to be right. And if you were really
good at it, it might be difficult, especially on a
casual glance, to notice that anything hinky has happened. There's
some examples where you can look at and think, huh,
(43:54):
if I did not know that there once was someone
standing there, I never would have picked up on the
fact that this photo has been altered. There are others
where there might be some clues, particularly with things that
have fine detail. Sometimes that will be a giveaway. There's
one with Hitler that's pretty noticeable. With well technically without Gebals.
It was originally Girbels was in the photograph. And I
(44:16):
love that every instance that talks about this says, we
don't know why. Yeah, we don't know why Hitler got
mad at Gebels or what the reasoning was, or why
he decided to erase him from this photo. He just did.
And it's not done particularly well because here's a blob. Yeah.
The Stalin one is a little more convincing, mostly because
the water in the background is a very light, like
(44:37):
the sunlight is hitting it, so it's harder to see
that there was once a form there um. But some
of the other ones are a lot more obvious, by
the way. The Stalin one, when I see the before
and after pictures, to me, it just feels like one
moment Stalin's there next to him, and the next moment,
Stalin just pushes him off into the river, which somewhere. Yeah,
(44:59):
it's not that far off from the truth because he
did have him executed, so uh. And I don't mean
to laugh about that. I don't think it's funny, but
I but it is one of those images where you
just look at and you you know, it lends itself
to that kind of thought. Uh and Hitler and Stalin
were not the only ones to do this. Mounts a
tongue did it. He had a famous photo where there
(45:21):
was a supporter named Poku who was posed among I
think they were like originally there were four people in
the photograph and then three Poku was removed. Uh, Poku
fell out of favor, and you can tell that this
one was manipulated to there's Uh, there's a background behind
where Poku was standing that has mysteriously gotten really blobby
(45:42):
and dark, and it's not the same color as the
surrounding wood in the structure that's there. So if you
look at the first photo where you can see where
the wood is a certain standard color all the way
through up to the point where you can't see it
anymore because pocus in the way and the other one
looks all blobby, You're like, something's wrong. It's also weird
when it's you. You see like a lineup of people
(46:04):
and then you wonder, like why are they standing like that? Yeah?
Can I talk about my favorite? Sure, it's the one
of Mussolini. Have you seen this one where he's on
a horse and he's holding a sword up to the
sky and uh. In the original there's a horse handler, yes,
standing right at the very mouth of the horse hold
in the horse's head, steady, and he had and removed
(46:26):
and it's a good it's a good it's a good job.
It looks it looks legitimate. But not like the artist
gave the horse buck teeth or something. But just that idea, um,
I think is the perfect amount of posturing for someone
like that, they would definitely do something like and and
that's exactly what I was saying before, with the idea
that you know, to try and make certain figures seem
(46:48):
more majestic. Uh. You know, if if you're if your
identity that you are presenting to the public relies on
the fact that you are this powerful figure, you don't
want it seeing that you need someone there to control
the horse that you're sitting on. You wanted to look
like you have that, you know, that amazing ability yourself,
(47:11):
so you don't want there to seem to be any
sign of weakness perceived in any way. And that was
another great example of that. Um. Did you did you
know about the one from from a group of Russians
who are erecting the Soviet flag above the Reichstag. Yes,
and that in the original image, Uh, one of them
(47:33):
has on two watches. Yeah, he has a band on
his right arm that some people think was a watch,
but it probably was actually a compass, so it probably
was legitimately there. But the reason why the image is altered.
If you look at the altered image, the band has
gone off the right arm. And the reasoning was that
(47:54):
if people saw that he had a band on his
right arm, they would think he must already be wearing
a watch on his left arm. That's where people wear
their watches. So he must have been looting the bodies
of the dead and put on another watch on his
other arm, and they didn't want that to be part
of the image. Truth is, he probably didn't loud the dead.
He probably was wearing a compass on that arm and
(48:16):
a watch on his other arm. That idea to come to. Yeah,
it's and and it's interesting because to me, it's interesting
in that they were just trying to bypass a misinterpretation
of the photo and that in fact the photo was
probably already not indicating that this guy was a looter.
(48:37):
It was just well, to be safe, we should probably
take that out and it's also a very small part
of the photograph. Yeah, I mean it's this is not
like a close up on the man's wrist, in fact
that you have to look really closely to notice it.
But they were concerned and so they did. And then
the next one I have is actually you you mentioned him, uh,
(48:59):
Jerry Ulsman in nineteen sixty nine, one of the most
most striking photos I've seen that again was presented without
it being you know, it's not meant to deceive or misrepresent.
It's an artistic expression and it is this amazing photo
of trees that are suspended in the air, complete with
(49:22):
roots systems, and it's gorgeous. And if if you haven't
seen his work, I would suggest looking at it because
his surreal and impeccably done. Yeah, it is amazing to
look at. I I was and I'm not generally speaking
of visual arts kind of guy um one of my
other flaws, but when I saw this, I just couldn't
(49:43):
help but really appreciate the mastery of the art that
it would take to produce such an image. It's interesting
because his wife is as good at photoshop as he
is in the dark room. Interesting. Yeah, we'll have to
talk more about that in part two. Um, So there's
some other examples we can give, Like there's there's the
famous National Geographic UH cover in N two push the
(50:08):
pyramids closer together for a better composition of yeah. Yeah.
The the original photo was done in sort of a
landscape mode, and of course, in order to put it
onto a cover of a magazine, they needed to be
more portraits, so they squished them together. So if you
look the pyramids are they appear to be geographically closer
to one another than they are in reality. And some
people began to criticize the magazine for saying, you're you're
(50:33):
misrepresenting reality. You're putting this forward as if this is
the way it looks, and this is not how it looks.
And in fact, um they got a new director of
photography who said that, um, everyone in that GEO thought
that this was the wrong decision after it went up.
This was a mistake, not a mistake in the sense
of oops, we did this, but more like that's something
(50:55):
that we should not do because it doesn't reflect the
mission of our magazine. And so they had essentially made
a statement saying we're not going to do that. Ever. Again,
that's one of the last pre digital cases I can
I can think of. Yeah, the most the ones I
think of certainly happened after the digital era begins, like
(51:18):
the really famous ones. Obviously there are countless examples that
are out there, but that's the last one I have
of the really uh, the notable ones in the pre
digital era. And now there were some others that happened
in the post digital era that probably still use some
old school approach, like I'm thinking specifically of a TV
guide car that will talk about in part two. But
(51:41):
let me ask you this, Dylan. Have you have you,
as a photographer dabbled in some of these techniques for
whatever purpose almost every day? Yeah? Yeah, since I don't
do photojournalism, Um, I'm not trying to do anything that
I don't believe is ethical, right, Um, but let's say that,
(52:02):
for example, here at how stuff works, I've taken photographs
of the staff, and everyone's a while to take. We
have these great big windows that overlook uh the street,
and um, it's nice to post people and from them
because there's a great light in that area. And so
I'll take a portrait of one of our hosts in
front of that window and then i'll upload it onto
(52:24):
the computer. I'll realize, oh, there's some cars on the
road right there. I don't want those cars right there,
so you remove I remove the cars. Or I took
a photograph of a couple of our hosts in front
of the apartment building across the street, and I thought, well,
the name of the apartment building isn't part of our brand,
so I should just take it out. Things like that,
(52:44):
it's just cleaning it up. It's um and things like
that I know happen every day. I think that. And
now photo manipulation is probably a little bit like auto tune,
where you might not know it, but almost every major
release you here has at least a little bit of
auto tune. Yeah, because the original purpose of auto tune
(53:05):
was to be unnoticed. It wasn't meant to be a
a new form of performance. That's how it got that's
what it got turned into. And then you had people
who were behind auto tune saying, well, crap. The whole
purpose of this was to make make to correct little
errors and get people closer to being on key and
(53:26):
on tune without it becoming a noticeable thing. And now
you guys are are are pushing this into something else,
not that that isn't legitimate. I mean, I think it's
always important to recognize the art sometimes takes established processes
or technologies and pushes them in new ways, and that's
how you get new stuff. Yeah, you get the share
(53:46):
effect an auto tune, or you have Andy Warhol making
prints until they deteriorate over and over again on like
a like a screen print, over and over again. But
just like how auto tune tries to find the right
note between two two different notes, tries to get you
to that right note. Uh, I think a lot of
(54:06):
people put their their photographs into a light room or
photoshop and they just try and get it to the
right exposure, the right saturation, uh, color correction, dodging and burning,
which we can talk about in the second episode. Just
small things like that that I think people have become
so accustomed to that if you gave them an image
right out of the camera, they would feel like it
(54:29):
could have been improved upon. Yeah, this to me is
really the fascinating part of this, the idea that as
someone who's who's a casual shutter bug at best, like
I am not known for the making great composition of shots,
I take pictures casually in order to capture moments to remember,
(54:50):
and that's about it. Like, that's that's about as far
as my expertise goes in that area. I have a
deep appreciation for people who have a great understanding of composition,
of lighting, of what needs to happen on the camera
side in order to capture the moment that you intend
to capture, and only that, but what has to happen
on the back end after the photo has been quote
(55:12):
unquote taken in order for you to have the finished
picture represent your vision, especially as an artist. That's that
to me is amazing, Like a lot I think, I
think I often would think of photography the way a
lot of early photographers thought about it, that photography's purpose
is to capture a moment um as close to representing
(55:35):
it in as being real as possible, like like capturing
that real moment forever and fixing it in a medium
so it can stay that way for the end of time.
And I don't necessarily, or at least I didn't think
about the fact that sometimes the point where you push
the shutter button on your camera is just the beginning,
(55:58):
and then you have another process us that follows to
get to the photo that you want that actually represents
your vision. There are definitely two sides of it. I
mean to have the idea of, like you said, getting
a photograph, saving it for history and not touching it,
(56:18):
I think is also very important depending on the case.
It's like when you get the audio of the State
of the Union, or if the President makes an address,
you don't cut it because that that can change context.
You shouldn't do the same thing um with photojournalism, or
(56:39):
at least most people believe that. It's like there was
a famous example in seventy at the Kent State shootings
that there's a picture of a body on the ground
and there's a woman grieving over it, and there was
a pole sticking out from behind her head. Um, and
someone saw that photograph and took the pole out. And
(57:02):
does it change the context of the photograph? Not particularly.
It was done for compositional reasons, to make it more
aesthetically pleasing. One of the things that I learned when
I went to college photophotography is never have a pole
behind someone's head. It's just it's just you don't do it.
It's distracting. And yes, but if it starts there with photojournalism,
(57:23):
if you start by removing a pole, it could only
escalate from there um and you know, you get to
a point where you're like, all right, it was a
pole in this case. All right, it was someone's ring
in this case, which changes the context depending upon the culture,
or it was you know, removing an entire person and
erasing that person's presence from an actual historical moment. I mean,
(57:44):
it does become a slope, right, And if when people
find out, it raises more questions than it ever really answers, sure,
because then you start questioning the motivations behind the action,
and then you think, well, what are your ulterior motives
for making these alterations to this photograph? And uh, you know,
we've explored some of that here. In some cases it
(58:05):
was meant to mislead people specifically, in some cases it
was a matter of ego, uh, and sometimes ego to
the point of of megalomaniac maniake the egos I mean
Stalin and and Mault s Tong and the biggest egos
of the twentieth century learned mostly and yeah, yeah, yeah,
(58:26):
I mean those are big egos and to the point
where if you want someone gone you don't just kill them,
but you erase all record of them. That's insane really
to me. But as far as people who would have
like who would have a history of having photos manipulated, yeah,
(58:46):
it makes total sense that those would be the personalities
that demand these things. And we've also, of course, there
are plenty of examples of other artists and photographers who
have manipulated him, just using pictures of people like those, uh,
in order to lampoon or youth satire or some other
(59:09):
means to make a message. Like there's a famous one, uh,
not a particularly convincing, uh, cut and paste job, but
there was one where it's a picture of of of
someone dressed up with an apron and they're holding a
cleaver and they're about to chop the head off of
a of a bird, a bird that represents France, and
(59:31):
they've cut and paste Hitler's head on top of the
person's head, thus representing Hitler's approach to attacking and and
conquering France. And it was meant as a political statement,
and it wasn't meant to mislead obviously, it wasn't. It wasn't.
The intent wasn't to suggest, like, look at this weird picture.
I got a hitler. It was obviously to make a statement. Yes, yeah,
(59:54):
so lots of different reasons for this. Now this is
really neat because it does show the amount of work
necessary to edit and manipulate photos. Sometimes it meant taking
a risk that you might ruin the negative that you
had created. Not all of these manipulations when you had
to go back to the negative and make some changes, No,
(01:00:14):
all of them turned out great, And there is no
undo button. Yeah, so we have no way of knowing
how many potentially historical images we've lost as a result
of an error made in the manipulation process. I hope
you enjoyed that classic episode of tech stuff. We'll be
back next week with part two. This is another one
(01:00:34):
of those topics that I could easily do an update
too and talk about some of the new tools for
editing photos and videos and more, and how machine learning
and artificial intelligence have greatly enhanced our ability to manipulate
photos to the point where it's hard to trust anything
you see these days in many ways. But we'll be
(01:00:55):
back next week to conclude this two parter, and in
the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics, I should
cover on tech Stuff. Feel free to reach out to me.
One way to do that is to download the i
Heart Radio app. It's free to use. Just navigate over
to the tech Stuff page on I Heart Radios podcast
app and you can leave a message by clicking on
a little microphone icon that lets you leave up to
(01:01:16):
thirty seconds of audio. Please be kind and uh. You
can let me know what you would like me to
talk about on the show, or if you prefer, you
can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for
the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Tech Stuff is
(01:01:38):
an i Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
John Than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio
and how the tech area. It's time for a classic
episode of tech Stuff. This episode is titled Photo Editing
and Manipulation Art one, So I guess you can probably
(00:30):
make an educated guess about what next week's classic episode
is going to be. This episode originally published on August
thirty one, two thousand fifteen. Dylan, who at the time
was sort of working in our our social media and
marketing areas, was a guest host on this one. Now
Dylan is a managing executive producer with I Heart, So
(00:52):
the dude is a superstar at I Heart really is
an incredible person, does incredible work. By way back then,
Dylan was fairly new and uh so I decided to
show in the ropes and have them on to talk
about manipulating photos online for fun and profit. Enjoy. Dylan
(01:13):
has generously offered up some of his precious time to
jump into the studio to talk about photo manipulation and
photo editing. So this is going to be a two
part podcast. We know that starting off, we're gonna concentrate
on sort of the pre digital era for this first episode,
and then our next one will be kind of the
(01:33):
various techniques and motivations behind photo manipulation and the post
digital era where we're no longer talking necessarily about physical
media but lots of zeros and ones instead. But the
the interesting thing to me is that photo manipulation has
been around almost as long as photography has, and in
(01:57):
large part because of the limitation of photography, especially the
early days, it was kind of seen early on as Okay, well,
we have the foundation down, now how do we make
up for all the things that we can't do at
least yet. You know, you don't know in their mind
if they knew that was going to be a possibility
in the future, but um, it kind of gave them
(02:20):
the ability to add to a photo what cameras were
not able to do at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, those
early cameras were incredibly limited. And uh, you know, it
helps if we take kind of a step back and
look at a little bit of history. And by a
little bit of history, I mean I've created a timeline
(02:41):
to kind of walk us through the early development no
pun intended. Okay, no, that was definitely a pun intended
of photography. So before we get to any photography at all,
before we get to the point where we're recording light
onto some medium, we can talk a little bit about
the camera obscura, which was not necessarily about recording recording images,
(03:04):
but more about projecting them. Yes, and this is ancient technology.
I mean, when you think about it, the basic technology
was a dark chamber or room through which you have
a hole in one wall and then you can project
across the on the opposite wall. Yeah, and uh, what
you saw on the opposite wall would be correct in perspective,
(03:28):
but it would be eight degrees rotating hundred degrees. It
would be upside down. Yeah. So I I have often
seen this used as a way for artists who wanted
to do a big wall mural. For example, they would
have an image on one side, so it would be
projected large on the opposite where they could actually trace
things out, although not all artists were very capable of
(03:51):
doing this, and it wouldn't be until the Renaissance. Like
even though the technology itself was thousands of years old,
in the sense that the ancient Chinese and Greek we're
using the sort of yeah, it really does. It's always
like it's always like, well, you have you got to
look to the Middle East and you gotta look to
China for some of these amazing developments that took a
long time to make their way to the Western world.
(04:13):
But in the Renaissance, there was an Italian writer named
Gia Batista de la Porta who was really the first
to use a lens arrangement in camera scarre. So it
was more than just the simple hole or a mirror.
It was a lens. And uh, that's where we started
really calling it camera obscura. And then you move ahead
(04:35):
about a hundred two hundred years to seventy seven, and
that's when a gentleman by the name of Johann Heinrich
Schulz uh noticed something really odd. In fact, it was
something that other people had noticed, but he was the
one who actually put two and two together. We're talking
silver salts here. Now, silver salts, when exposed to light, uh,
(04:59):
get darker. And this is a major part of early photography.
But for a long time people thought that it was
heat that made the salts turn dark. Now, what Schultz
did was he had an experiment where he he had
essentially a surface covered in silver salts, and he put
(05:20):
a covering over it so that he could spell out
a word in the silver salt and then expose that
to light, and it made those salts turn dark. So
he actually could spell out words using light this way,
but he didn't have any way of preserving it. There's
no way for him to keep this so that it
would permanently have this word. In fact, as soon as
you remove the covering and the rest of the salts
(05:43):
are exposed to light, everything turns dark. So it's like
you have a temporary image. It's kind of like the
Snapchat of its day. Yeah, that a very very kind
of simple snapchat where someone would have to be in
there with you and be like, all right, you're gonna
have to look at this right now, because as soon
as I turn on the light, this sucker, it's it's
(06:06):
it's time. Will be very limited a latent image. Um yeah,
in a way that like if you see something very
bright and you close your eyes, right there it is. Yeah,
So it wouldn't be until the eighteen twenties. That's when
a fellow by the name of Anissa four Neepsie thank
you for pronouncing that that's a guess, my French jump.
(06:28):
Papa francis bien malorism So I am not very good
with the French pronunciation. I haven't had French since high school,
so I apologize for butchering the name. But he developed
a technique to use light in order to make copies
of engravings. And what he would do is he would
take it engraving and covered in oil and then he
(06:50):
would put the engraving on a plate that was coated
with a combination of lavender oil and vitamin of Judea,
which is a light sensitive material. And yeah, and he
had the first successful image in eighteen sixteen. Yeah, amazing, right,
Like he was able to use this and he called
the process heliography, meaning from the sun to right, so
(07:14):
it was close to photography, but he was calling it heliography.
By eighteen twenty six he was using that process on
lots of stuff like lithographic stone, on glass, on zinc,
and on pewter plates. And in eight he used a
camera obscura computer plate to produce a photograph from nature.
It was an image of the courtyard of his estate.
It was taken from an upstairs balcony and over the
(07:37):
course of eight hours. Yes, it took a number of hours. Yeah,
that was the real issue where with these early approaches
is that they had not perfected the chemistry necessary to
have this reaction of light that would affect chemicals in
such a way as to preserve an image. What's really
funny is that the lens technology was much farther ahead
(07:58):
from the start than the chemist street and a lot
of early photography was really only limited by the chemicals involved. Right, Yeah,
so you would end up having these super long exposure
times in the in some cases it meant that the
the image you produced is otherworldly because in the case
of this one with a courtyard, the lights coming from
(08:21):
the sun, and it's over the course of eight hours,
which reads, the sun starts in the east and ends
in the west, So in the finished image you have
light from the sun shining from both directions. It's as if,
you know, obviously, we don't live in a world where
you can really do that in a in an instant.
You would have to have this long exposure time in
order to achieve that, so kind of a special effect
(08:43):
just by the very limitation of the media itself. Yeah,
the exposure time is early on would would make things,
like you said, look very otherworldly. And it was just
because it was out of necessity, that's what they had. Yeah,
they didn't have any option really like, it wasn't like
it had nothing to do with shutter speed or any
of the other stuff we talked about with cameras. It
(09:03):
had specifically to do with the limitation of the materials,
the chemicals they were using. By eighteen thirty three, that's
when we first start seeing the term photograph being used. Uh.
And in fact, it was apparently coined by a fellow
named Hercules Florence or Hercule floren if you want to
(09:25):
be fancy. Uh. He coined the term, using it to
describe a process in which he used paper with silver
salts to produce prints of drawings. However, his work actually
largely took place in Brazil, and because Brazil was so
far removed from all the other areas that we're looking
into this mostly in Europe, his work remained largely unknown
(09:47):
until the nineteen seventies. And I would like to notice
is his really interesting work. It's something to look into.
He had some nice photographs. Yeah. Yeah, And and our
next fellow who made a big impression on photography is
one that probably most people have heard, at least heard
the technology named after him. That would be uh, Louis Jacquemond,
(10:12):
the gear type. Yeah. So he used the camera obscura
in a plate of iodized silver, which would allow him
to create a latent image of a scene. That's what
Dylan was talking about just a minute ago. And he
found that if you expose that plate to mercury vapor,
the exposed parts of the image, the ones that had
been exposed to light, would become visible, so it would develop.
(10:38):
This is where we start talking about developing photographs, and
that approach reduced the exposure times needed eventually from eight
hours down to around half an hour ish um using
this particular approach, But there was a drawback. If the
developed picture was exposed to light, like after you've taken it,
then the unexposed areas of silver would continue to darken
(10:58):
and eventually the image would become impossible to see. Dylan
and I will be back in just a moment to
talk more about photo editing and manipulation after these messages.
Imagine that you have a photograph in your hand and
(11:19):
you take it out anywhere where there's light, and it
would just gradually become a dark picture, like there will
be no no, no way of distinguishing what was there before. Yeah,
Like like before you expose film and a film camera,
if anyone's ever done that, you have to go into
a pitch black room to do so because once you
open the back of the light tight camera, when if
(11:41):
you have that film exposed to the you know, to light,
it's it's just gonna go completely dark. You're not going
to be able to take any photographs with that role
of film right now, Dylan, have you ever worked in
the dark room? I have, yes, So what is what
is it like when you are doing something like that,
Like you know, the we've seen movies with the process
where you've got the people with like the three or
(12:03):
four different little basins filled with fluid and there's never
any explanation of what was actually happening. It is it's
an updated version of something like the GEA was doing.
The chemicals are a lot less dangerous, Yeah right, we're
not using mercury rap, You're a lot less likely to
go crazy or catch on fire. Yes, yes, but it's
(12:25):
a it's a process. But it's something that I think
if you're interested in photography, you should. You should try
the development process, um because from going into the closet
to load your film, figuring out how to open something
and put it in the back of the camera in
Pitch Black, is is a lot of it's frustrating, but
(12:48):
it's a lot of fun. And then you you know,
even to the I don't want to get to ahead
of us, but the photo the process of taking the
photographs a lot different because you realize you have, like
of the thirties six shots and so it's it's not
like on your phone or on your digital camera, which
is which is great freedom, but you think I paid
(13:10):
I paid money for this film, and it makes you
much more selective and careful. And and not only that,
but I mean even that is a huge step from
what we're talking about here, where taking a single image
required so much effort just the not just the taking it,
but the developing of that single image took so much
(13:30):
effort that obviously the composition of your shot was really
important and if you mess that up, you're talking about
a day's work. In some cases, that's a lot of
for one image. It's it's easy for us to forget
that in the realm of selfies that we have today. Yeah,
so I'll definitely be relying upon you heavily when we
(13:51):
start talking about manipulation in this world. But to get
back to the history, just a couple more points I
want to make. Uh, so we've got to air who
starts solving the problem of this image immediately disappearing if
you were to expose it to light by using ordinary
table salt. Actually, yeah, he put it in a water solution.
(14:12):
You got your sodium chloride solution. He would use that
to dissolve the unexposed silver iodide that was left on
the paper. So that way the exposed stuff had already
been exposed. It's fine, you dissolve everything else, so now
that stuff can't end up going dark, and you're left
with your image, and you could fix it permanently because
(14:32):
light can no longer ruin them. And uh, Eventually the
Gara would find a way of producing photographs on silvered
copper plate, which was kind of his his medium of
choice from that point forward. Meanwhile, there was another fellow,
William Henry Fox Talbot, who was working on a different
approach to create photographic images of scientific observations. The reason
(14:56):
all right, he was a scientist, not he wasn't necessarily
interested in photogra if he originally he was interested in science.
But he had a problem. He couldn't draw at all.
He had like he would try all these sort of
things so that he would just trace using a camera.
Obscura didn't matter. He found himself incapable of doing that.
(15:16):
I find myself sympathizing heavily with him. I have a
distinct lack of artistic ability when it comes to that.
So he wanted to find a way to preserve scientific
observations exactly as they were and record them in a
way that would not require him to draw in any way, shape,
or fashion. So he started to look into a way
(15:38):
to create photographic prints on paper, not using plates like
the gear was using. So he used paper soaked in
solutions of sodium chloride and silver nitrate in order to
produce silver chloride infused paper. And if he exposed that
paper to light, it would cause the exposed parts to
become dark, and that would create a negative image. If
(15:59):
he took another sheet of this and put it against
the one that had been exposed, and then exposed that
to light, that would create a positive image. On the
second sheet, and for the first time you could get
hypothetically more than one print from a picture. Yes, you
were not limited to whatever the original plate was. Now
you could produce multiple prints, assuming that everything stayed intact.
(16:23):
Through this process, which was painstaking, it was still not
easy to do um and in fact, there were times
where it took some experimentation with this approach to get
it to work just right, because often they were having
quality issues with transferring the image from the negative to
the the secondary sheet. And it wasn't until thirty nine
(16:46):
that Talbot felt that he had really nailed it. He
had actually talked with his friend and astronomer named Sir
John herschel Uh in a way to fix the negatives
using sodium thiosulfate which at the time they called sodium
hypo sulfate, and found that that was what allowed it.
And then then he heard about the gear and he thought, oh,
because this is the era of everyone trying to get
(17:08):
patents for things to protect their ideas so that other
folks don't just run away with them. So he immediately
rushes to publication to beat the French to the punch
because he knew that the French publication about the Gears
work was coming, so he said, well, I can't drag
my feet on this and rushed ahead. Uh and this
is a story we hear over and over again in technology.
(17:30):
It's not you know. Radio was another big one like that,
so television as well. So eighteen forty was the March.
Eighteen forty was really when the first photography studio that
we know of opened, And it was in New York
City and it was it was called the Dagaron Parlor
(17:53):
and it was operated by Alexander Woolcott. And uh so
you finally had a place. It was open to the public.
It was no longer these uh, the scientists, physicists, researchers
and others who were all interested in this concept. Now
it was something that ordinary people could have some access to,
(18:14):
the beginning of a long road to making photography very personal. Yes,
and also the birth of our era of narcissism. That's
probably being unkind, uh andund Around this time you also
started to see improvements in both lens design, camera design,
(18:34):
and the chemical processes that meant that development time had
decreased significantly enough where you could sit for a portrait
without having to stay absolutely still for three hours, which
that's good, you know. Suddenly, suddenly portraiture became more of
an attainable thing for families, and it became very popular
(18:57):
pretty early on, especially by the eighteen sixties to the
eighteen eighties, it became it was a huge movement at
that point. And there are lots more things that happened
from that point forward. Obviously, there was the development of
calo type, which is a negative development process that Talbot
had created that made photography on paper more practical by
(19:18):
reducing the exposure times down to one minute. Pretty incredible
at the time. Stereoscopic photography became a thing. That's when
you take two images using cameras or lenses that approximate
the distance of a person's eyes. One of those, oh
you did, and that was very popular during the Civil War. Yes,
(19:38):
it was exactly. Yeah, you would take you would take
these two images and then you would use something called
usually called a stereoscope, which was essentially a kind of
a pair of glasses that held the two images at
a certain distance from your eyes, so when you looked
at it, it creates the illusion of depth. It's essentially
a primitive three D and a lot of them you
could adjust the lenses back and forth until the image
(20:02):
came in focus for you. Right, Yeah, because of course
not everyone is like our Our focal points are a
little different. Uh. It's the same thing that we see
now with various headsets where you have ways to adjust
the lenses so that if your eyes are a little
set a little further apart, are a little closer together,
because a tiny difference from the average can mean you
(20:24):
have a very different experience than someone who is closer.
To the end, you can still do the exact same
thing on a digital s l R through the viewfinder.
Everybody can just set it up for because sometimes you'll
pick up someone else's and and you're like, wow, this
person has very different eyes than I do. And also
you can get a very similar effect to this using Uh.
(20:44):
There there are apps on phones now that do essentially
the same thing that this is doing, only they're using
the the software in an app that like a Google
Cardboard is an example where you actually go and you
buy a little cardboard headset and you turn your phone
landscape side, you activate the Google Cardboard app, you slide
(21:06):
it into the headset, and now you've got your own
little virtual reality headset. It's based on the exact same
principle as this photography. It's just in that case you're
talking about more like video animation that kind of stuff
rather than still photography, but it's the same idea. Then
there was the wet Colodeon process, which I don't know
if I'm even saying that correctly. Yes, Oh, excellent, that
(21:26):
was used to make glass negatives and was much faster
than earlier methods, provided that you were able to work quickly. Yeah,
I mean you it it kind of birth digital. I
mean not that it kind of birthed the portable dark room. Yeah,
because if you had everything with you, you could do
it in like fifteen minutes, that's which was incredible speed
(21:47):
compared to the previous methods. Yeah, and you could have
huge glass plates. Yeah, so you can make enormous negatives. Wow.
So the challenge here is that the the method relied
upon the glass retaining that that moisture on it that
was used for the process, and if it dried out,
(22:08):
then your negative was ruined. So you had to work
quickly in order for you to be able to take
advantage of this. But on the flip side, the process
itself was very fast, So that was a big advance
and then there was an even larger one a little
bit later, which was the dry plate technology. I was
developed by an English physician named Wretcher Richard Leech Maddox
(22:28):
in eight seventy one UM, which eliminates some of the
drawbacks of the glass approach. You didn't have to have
the plate remain wet for the whole process. We'll have
a bit more to talk about with photo editing and
manipulation after this quick break. Early manipulation, sometimes it was
(22:54):
again it was perfectly innocent. It might be that you
take an image and you look at the negative and
you realize from the net negative that there is a
flaw of some sort, So you might alter the negative
a little bit before creating a print so that you
can compensate for some error that was made. Either the
exposure wasn't quite right, the lighting wasn't quite right, or
(23:14):
the subject moved or whatever. That may be the same
thing that we do today. Yeah, So it's not necessarily
a sinister or unethical uh motivation to manipulate a photo,
but there are those as well. So if you look
at some of the earlier edits, sometimes it meant that
(23:34):
you would alter the negative. As I had mentioned, sometimes
you would alter a print, um, in which case you might.
In fact, early because we were limited to black and
white photography, you had some people who would present make photographs.
So make a make a print of a photograph or
a negative rather and then turn it over to an
artist who might actually add color by painting over the photograph.
(23:57):
You want blue skies, you know, you a little pan
on there. Yeah. Yeah, it's the best solution to the
problem at the time. So that was a type of
photo manipulation. I mean, it was one that everyone was
aware of, but it was still a way of manipulating
the photos. Uh. You could also do things like you
could do a composite uh picture where that's a little
(24:19):
bit odd. Honestly, this was one of those things that
I understand the basics of, but I don't know how
it would actually happen. But generally speaking, you would use
two or more negatives to produce a single print, and
there were a lot of composites out there for They
were done for various reasons, sometimes in order to include
(24:40):
a person who was not able to be present at
a particular photo session, or to create a particular artistic feel.
There's some really famous artists who composed amazing pictures using
as many as fifty or more negatives in order to
achieve it. And honestly, at that point, I'm like, you
guys aremagish. I don't know how this works. Yeah, I mean,
(25:02):
as far as photo montage, photo manipulation goes, there are
people like Jerry Yulesman who goes into a dark room,
takes fifty negative splices them up with an exact o
knife and makes a print and you you can't tell.
It's like someone using photoshop in their wizard, but it's
all analog. But early on you had you had Matthew Brady,
(25:22):
who I like to think of and I think a
lot of people think of him this way as the
first celebrity photographer who had a studio, and he took
portraits of almost every politician around that period around like
the Civil War era, um and he had two very
famous manipulations, one that he did not do, but one
(25:43):
of his photographs was used for part of it. I'm
guessing that's the Lincoln one. The Lincoln portrait that is
his it's his head, um that Matthew Brady took that photograph.
It's the same one that's used on the five dollar
bill exactly. And the body was of John Calhoun was
Southerner entirely, and it was too. It was because during
(26:06):
Lincoln's life they felt like they didn't have enough heroic
photographs of Lincoln. Yes, this is an iconic picture of
what appears to be Lincoln standing in front of a desk,
and there's like an American flag in the picture, and uh,
there's um, you know, it's a it's a very striking photograph,
it is. And what's really interesting to me is even
(26:29):
back then, the amount of manipulation in that photograph, Uh,
that there are papers on the table, and when it
was a portrait of John Calhoun, the words on the
table that you could read where strict constitution, free trade,
and the sovereignty of the States. But the Lincoln version
says Constitution, Union and the Proclamation of Freedom. That's fascinating
(26:55):
that they were able to get to that level of
granularity in the change. And you know, there there are
lots of different ways of achieving this sort of stuff.
I mean, there was the you know, you could go
to the negative and you could change the negative by
splicing stuff together, and then producing a print, or you
could do something where you're literally cutting and pasting, but
you're doing it on the print, and then you take
(27:16):
a photograph of the print, developed that and that becomes
your new photographs. So in other words, you can take
two pictures and you literally cut out the image of
something that you want from one, paste it over top
the image that already exists, take a photo of it,
develop it, and that could be a way of doing
it too. That's so interesting because that's something that I
(27:37):
think a lot of people did in elementary school, is
that they went through magazines for projects and I would
cut out one part and put it over another part.
Is very much like collage. It's yeah, and and there
was the picture Matthew Brady did of US S. S. Grant,
and that's supposed to be of him in front of
his troops in City Point, Virginia. Yeah, but it's not. No,
(27:57):
it's actually three different photos all meshed together. Uh. It's
it's the body of Major General Alexander M. M. Cook
And uh, then it's the head of Ulysses S. Grant
on top of the body. So the body is on
a horse, So it's Ulysses S. Grant on the body
of this other general major general, and the people in
(28:19):
the background are not Union soldiers, their Confederate prisoners. Yeah,
so it's it's it's that's a very interesting photo especially.
I think that's an early example of UM. I wouldn't
say that it was meant to deceive as much, but
of maybe misinformation. Yeah, you could argue, you know, you
could call it propaganda if you like. It was really
(28:41):
meant to create again, this heroic image. In fact, a
lot of the pictures that for political manipulation are really
about elevating a particular person to make them seem more
iconic and or or eliminate things that elevated person no
longer liked. Very military based for the most well, yeah,
(29:02):
a lot of a lot of military ones. Uh. Yeah.
There's also the the General Francis P. P. Blair being
added to a group of of other generals, including General Sherman.
So this is a group. If you see the two
different photos, you'll see one where there's a group of
generals sitting together, and then the second photo there's an
(29:23):
extra general sitting way off to the right. Yeah, that
was that other Matthew Brady image I was speaking of.
And it's also really well done. Yeah, yeah, I mean
it's he's he's definitely feels a little ostracized. But other
than that, it looks like he fits it does. Yeah,
maybe he wasn't. Maybe they felt like he wasn't as
important for it was a little bit over in the corner.
(29:44):
You're gonna go sit up the kid's table and let
the adult generals talk about the war over here. Yeah,
but it looks good. Yeah, it does look good. And
that is also really interesting to me because it was
clear that even early on, those photographers who are working
with this medium and trying to you create these composite
images or manipulate these photos in some way already had
(30:05):
an innate understanding of if I want to do this
and make it look right, lighting is really important. I
can't ignore the fact that a scene lit from the
left and as subject who's lit from the right that
I've added in later are going to look wrong. Yeah,
I mean they're even now. There are a lot of
photos released by by very professional agencies that don't take
(30:30):
as much of that into consideration as even some of
these people a d fifty years ago, right, and those
images get torn apart on Reddit. They do you can
go to Reddit and you'll just see people saying, well,
this is clearly photoshop because if you look at the
shadows they're on the you know, blah blah blah blah blah,
you can tell that the lighting is higher into the
left instead of low into the right or whatever. In
(30:50):
some cases it's really subtle and uh, and it's people
who have a greater attention span and better sense of
detail than idea. I'll look at it go like, holy cow,
you're right, Like I didn't notice it before. But yeah,
there's still some other really cool ones that I can
talk about. Like in eighteen seventy, photographer William H. Mummler
used double exposure. So that's another way of editing and
(31:13):
manipulating photos that we can talk about for a second.
He used double exposure to create what people have dubbed
spirit photography. Now, double exposure is exactly what it sounds like.
It's exposing the same whatever photographic medium, whether it's film
or a plate or whatever, to light twice, so you
can create kind of a double image look. And usually
(31:35):
one of those looks kind of transparent, like a weaker
image than the other one. And sometimes this was used
for artistic effect like that. I saw one that was
of an actor who in what in his in his
regular pose the darker pose, stood very tall and dignified,
and in the second post he's bent over with his
hands stretched out, kind of like a like a classic
(31:56):
universal monster. And the first thing I thought when I
saw it was that's a perfect photograph if you want
to get across the concept of Jekyl and hide. But
that was not what the intent was from what I
was reading. But as I saw it, I just thought
that was the immediate reaction I had. And Uh, in
this case, a mumbler used double exposures on a pretty
(32:16):
famous person, Mary Todd Lincoln. Yes, so there's this image
of Mary Todd seated and behind her is the ghostly
apparition of Abraham Lincoln and he even has his hands
on her shoulders and you could see through his hands
to her shoulders. It's pretty effective, and it helps because
he was lanky. It really does kindlish. Yeah, and and
(32:39):
again this is just achieved through double exposure. Some people
do this just for artistic effect. There have been cases
where people have used double exposure specifically to mislead or deceive,
but in this case, I wouldn't. I would. I would
argue that it wasn't necessarily meant to do that. It
was more of a memorium for someone at least that's
(33:00):
the implication. I feel. There were definitely ghost or spirit
photographers who took it a different way, and we're claiming
to get pictures of spirits. Yeah, like the ectoplasm uh
photography as well, just that whole I mean that that
gets past photography. But there are a lot of pictures
with people with cheese cloths coming out of there, right, yeah,
(33:23):
cheese cloth. That's like that's a go to for hoaxer's. Um. Yeah,
And I promise when we get to we'll probably save
it for post digital. But I gotta talk to you
about orbs, So we'll chat about orbs in the post
digital section. But I've got my favorite story of PHO. No,
it's not even photo manipulation, it's just trickery. I bet
(33:46):
it is. Does the year nineteen kind of fit into that? Fairies? Yes,
we're going to talk about the fairies. Okay, So Dylan,
you don't know this about me when I was but
it's not a surprise because I was a kid once.
When I was a kid, Uh, and I was going
to elementary school. I would check out all the books
(34:07):
on ghosts and monsters and folklore, and I would read
them cover to cover, and I would check him out again. Excellent.
So I will never forget when I was reading about
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and two young girls and a
bunch of fairies out in the woods. And the two
young girls were cousins or Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths,
(34:31):
and they had all these photographs of them sitting around
in Glenn's surrounded by fairies frolicking about. Yeah, the Coddingly
Fairies that was taken near Coddingly, England. Famous famous hoax
uh And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, the author
of the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries. He was for a long
(34:53):
time a hardcore skeptic, but then suffered some tragedy in
his life and started to turn to mysticism and spiritualists
in an effort to answer questions that he could not
answer himself. And there was sort of a decline. It
was very kind of ironic from someone who presented a
character who was as dispassionate and rationalist Sherlock Holmes. To
(35:17):
end up embracing the idea of these two girls who
had managed to capture images of fairies, And it wouldn't
be until near the end of their lives that they
revealed that all they did was take illustrations that were
from books and cut them out and paced them onto
cardboard and pose the cardboard around them and take photographs.
(35:39):
So they actually didn't do any manipulation at all. They
just set a scene and did I. I think it
wasn't until the late seventies or early eighties that one
of them admitted to it, and then the famous skeptic
James Randy also said that he was like, well, these
illustrations are exactly the same as these illustrations from this
(36:01):
book that came out in nineteen fifteen. Yeah. Yeah, he
he had a book called flim Flam where he talked
about it a lot. James Randy did. That was decades later. Yeah,
you have very much later. So that's that's crazy, because
they sent it that it folded a photographer named Harold Snelling,
and he said quote that they were genuine, unfaked photographs
(36:22):
of single exposure open air work show of movement and
all the fairy figures and there's no trace. Whatever studio
work involving card are paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures,
et cetera. Yeah, so he was. He was writing the
sense there was single exposure, yes, but there was no movement.
They were paper figures. In fact, there were people who's
who when they really looked at the photos, they said,
(36:44):
you can see evidence of some movement in the human subjects,
but the fairies, who presumably would be moving much faster
because some of them are like mid leap or flight
or whatever, there's no blurring around them. And again, the
exposure time at this point it was still relative a
long much longer than say the cameras that would be
used a few decades later, and so any fast movement
(37:06):
would be very blurry. It wouldn't come across so sharp
and crisp as these photos did. But they were very
compelling at the time, and a lot of people bought
into it, including Sir Arthur Knan Doyle. Uh. And I've
got another one. In nineteen twenty four. We have a
fellow by the name of Bernard McFadden who creates a
technique called composed a graph. Do you know of McFadden,
(37:28):
I don't. I don't believe so let me take you
down the lurid, dirty, dirty path to tabloid journalism, because
this is tabloid journalism at its most skiezy. So here
here's McFadden. He is working on a tabloid magazine called
(37:49):
New York Evening Graphic, which some people nicknamed porno Graphic.
So what he would do is there would be news
stories of various uh public figures, whether celebrities, politicians, whatever,
sports stars, whatever it may be, and there'd be a
(38:09):
story of some scandal. Like again, this is a tabloid,
so they're all about scandal. What he would do is
he would take images, uh like of people's faces in
these stories. Then he would pose um body doubles, sometimes
mannequins sometimes they were staffers of the magazine into a tableau,
(38:29):
take a picture, and then do a paste of the
famous people's heads on top of the figures that he
had posed, and then do things like a superimposed word
balloon on top of it to express some statement that
went along with the scandalous story. Wow, I mean, how
(38:51):
could it be skisier than like today's tabloids. But that's
that's that's on. That's just right there. I don't know
if you've ever seen have you ever seen any of
the computer animated videos that come out of It's some
Asian country, but it's but it's the retelling of famous story. Yeah,
same principle here, except he was doing it with still photography. Yeah.
(39:13):
And uh so that by the way, that that tabloid
did not last too long. I think in the early
nineteen thirties that it folded and it went bankrupt. But
um definitely was one of those means of photo manipulation
that gave the whole the whole concept of bad name.
So there were the political ones we had talked about previously,
(39:34):
then there was this one where I mean it's just
the beginning of a long line of commercial uses of
photo manipulation and photo editing in order to sell papers. Essentially,
it is what it gets down to, yeah, or or
you know, to kind of cause harm to someone's image. Yeah.
That that that that was the genesis of that, And
(39:55):
that's something that every time that political campaign come around
every four years, you have to be extra weary of
the photographs that start uh circulating. Yeah. And and not
only that, but you'll see artists will use it, usually transparently.
I mean the artist approach normally is not to create
(40:16):
an image that you think is real. The artist's intent
might be to make a statement about a particular person.
I remember seeing one artist who had created a photograph
and it was of a crowd out on the street,
and then overtop the crowd was this inky looking octopus
with the head of William Randolph Hearst. So obviously the
(40:38):
comment being that Hearst is manipulating the public through the media,
and obviously he's not inky, so nor does he have
eight appendages, so that makes sense. He had terrible taste
in home decor. I'll say that as someone who's walked
through the Hearst Castle. This was clearly a guy who
had so much money. He just said, I like that thing.
(40:59):
Put it in my else. It doesn't matter if baroque,
don't care if it's If it's broken Gothic in the
same room along with some even older stuff and some
newer stuff, that's fine. And I who have no taste
would walk through and go like, y'all, this is Tachi.
Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this tech stuff
(41:20):
classic episode right after we take this break. So let's
talk a little bit about not not adding stuff in
but taking stuff away also. That became pretty prevalent around
(41:42):
that same period of time, the nineteen twenties, that was
a big period of time for well, World War One,
World War two, that that kind of period in time. Yeah,
we had a lot of um of famous leaders who
had finnicky attitudes towards their followers, and when they would
(42:03):
get a little peeved that said followers, they would attempt
to erase said followers from history entirely. Not just not
just execute the person. That's not good enough. They have
to erase the fact that that person ever existed, including
removing them from photographs and some examples. Yeah, sometimes you
get removed from a photograph and you'd also be dead. Yes,
(42:24):
sometimes sometimes they would kill you first and then say,
all right, well now that he's dead, let's go ahead
and remove him from all the official photographs, like press photos,
things like that. Big famous example of this would be
a photo that originally had Nikolai Yazkov or Yeshov rather
posing with Joseph Stalin. This is the Vanishing Commissar photograph,
(42:50):
and um it's a picture of a group of gentlemen
including Mr Stalin, uh and yes Hoff and yes I'm
standing right next to um a wall that leads right
over to a river, and Staalin's immediately to his right,
and then the retouched photo he's gone. Yeah. An example
(43:11):
of air brushing. Yeah, air brushing exactly. So. An airbrush
is a tool that uses air to push through some
form of paint or ink or whatever it may be,
in order for you to do some uh, you know,
analog hand controlled art. And in some cases it could
be to hide something that was once there. Yeah, Like
(43:33):
if you use photoshop today, it's the same idea as
content to wear or the clones stamp, just to take
you know, to put texture back into the photograph where
something used to be right. And if you were really
good at it, it might be difficult, especially on a
casual glance, to notice that anything hinky has happened. There's
some examples where you can look at and think, huh,
(43:54):
if I did not know that there once was someone
standing there, I never would have picked up on the
fact that this photo has been altered. There are others
where there might be some clues, particularly with things that
have fine detail. Sometimes that will be a giveaway. There's
one with Hitler that's pretty noticeable. With well technically without Gebals.
It was originally Girbels was in the photograph. And I
(44:16):
love that every instance that talks about this says, we
don't know why. Yeah, we don't know why Hitler got
mad at Gebels or what the reasoning was, or why
he decided to erase him from this photo. He just did.
And it's not done particularly well because here's a blob. Yeah.
The Stalin one is a little more convincing, mostly because
the water in the background is a very light, like
(44:37):
the sunlight is hitting it, so it's harder to see
that there was once a form there um. But some
of the other ones are a lot more obvious, by
the way. The Stalin one, when I see the before
and after pictures, to me, it just feels like one
moment Stalin's there next to him, and the next moment,
Stalin just pushes him off into the river, which somewhere. Yeah,
(44:59):
it's not that far off from the truth because he
did have him executed, so uh. And I don't mean
to laugh about that. I don't think it's funny, but
I but it is one of those images where you
just look at and you you know, it lends itself
to that kind of thought. Uh and Hitler and Stalin
were not the only ones to do this. Mounts a
tongue did it. He had a famous photo where there
(45:21):
was a supporter named Poku who was posed among I
think they were like originally there were four people in
the photograph and then three Poku was removed. Uh, Poku
fell out of favor, and you can tell that this
one was manipulated to there's Uh, there's a background behind
where Poku was standing that has mysteriously gotten really blobby
(45:42):
and dark, and it's not the same color as the
surrounding wood in the structure that's there. So if you
look at the first photo where you can see where
the wood is a certain standard color all the way
through up to the point where you can't see it
anymore because pocus in the way and the other one
looks all blobby, You're like, something's wrong. It's also weird
when it's you. You see like a lineup of people
(46:04):
and then you wonder, like why are they standing like that? Yeah?
Can I talk about my favorite? Sure, it's the one
of Mussolini. Have you seen this one where he's on
a horse and he's holding a sword up to the
sky and uh. In the original there's a horse handler, yes,
standing right at the very mouth of the horse hold
in the horse's head, steady, and he had and removed
(46:26):
and it's a good it's a good it's a good job.
It looks it looks legitimate. But not like the artist
gave the horse buck teeth or something. But just that idea, um,
I think is the perfect amount of posturing for someone
like that, they would definitely do something like and and
that's exactly what I was saying before, with the idea
that you know, to try and make certain figures seem
(46:48):
more majestic. Uh. You know, if if you're if your
identity that you are presenting to the public relies on
the fact that you are this powerful figure, you don't
want it seeing that you need someone there to control
the horse that you're sitting on. You wanted to look
like you have that, you know, that amazing ability yourself,
(47:11):
so you don't want there to seem to be any
sign of weakness perceived in any way. And that was
another great example of that. Um. Did you did you
know about the one from from a group of Russians
who are erecting the Soviet flag above the Reichstag. Yes,
and that in the original image, Uh, one of them
(47:33):
has on two watches. Yeah, he has a band on
his right arm that some people think was a watch,
but it probably was actually a compass, so it probably
was legitimately there. But the reason why the image is altered.
If you look at the altered image, the band has
gone off the right arm. And the reasoning was that
(47:54):
if people saw that he had a band on his
right arm, they would think he must already be wearing
a watch on his left arm. That's where people wear
their watches. So he must have been looting the bodies
of the dead and put on another watch on his
other arm, and they didn't want that to be part
of the image. Truth is, he probably didn't loud the dead.
He probably was wearing a compass on that arm and
(48:16):
a watch on his other arm. That idea to come to. Yeah,
it's and and it's interesting because to me, it's interesting
in that they were just trying to bypass a misinterpretation
of the photo and that in fact the photo was
probably already not indicating that this guy was a looter.
(48:37):
It was just well, to be safe, we should probably
take that out and it's also a very small part
of the photograph. Yeah, I mean it's this is not
like a close up on the man's wrist, in fact
that you have to look really closely to notice it.
But they were concerned and so they did. And then
the next one I have is actually you you mentioned him, uh,
(48:59):
Jerry Ulsman in nineteen sixty nine, one of the most
most striking photos I've seen that again was presented without
it being you know, it's not meant to deceive or misrepresent.
It's an artistic expression and it is this amazing photo
of trees that are suspended in the air, complete with
(49:22):
roots systems, and it's gorgeous. And if if you haven't
seen his work, I would suggest looking at it because
his surreal and impeccably done. Yeah, it is amazing to
look at. I I was and I'm not generally speaking
of visual arts kind of guy um one of my
other flaws, but when I saw this, I just couldn't
(49:43):
help but really appreciate the mastery of the art that
it would take to produce such an image. It's interesting
because his wife is as good at photoshop as he
is in the dark room. Interesting. Yeah, we'll have to
talk more about that in part two. Um, So there's
some other examples we can give, Like there's there's the
famous National Geographic UH cover in N two push the
(50:08):
pyramids closer together for a better composition of yeah. Yeah.
The the original photo was done in sort of a
landscape mode, and of course, in order to put it
onto a cover of a magazine, they needed to be
more portraits, so they squished them together. So if you
look the pyramids are they appear to be geographically closer
to one another than they are in reality. And some
people began to criticize the magazine for saying, you're you're
(50:33):
misrepresenting reality. You're putting this forward as if this is
the way it looks, and this is not how it looks.
And in fact, um they got a new director of
photography who said that, um, everyone in that GEO thought
that this was the wrong decision after it went up.
This was a mistake, not a mistake in the sense
of oops, we did this, but more like that's something
(50:55):
that we should not do because it doesn't reflect the
mission of our magazine. And so they had essentially made
a statement saying we're not going to do that. Ever. Again,
that's one of the last pre digital cases I can
I can think of. Yeah, the most the ones I
think of certainly happened after the digital era begins, like
(51:18):
the really famous ones. Obviously there are countless examples that
are out there, but that's the last one I have
of the really uh, the notable ones in the pre
digital era. And now there were some others that happened
in the post digital era that probably still use some
old school approach, like I'm thinking specifically of a TV
guide car that will talk about in part two. But
(51:41):
let me ask you this, Dylan. Have you have you,
as a photographer dabbled in some of these techniques for
whatever purpose almost every day? Yeah? Yeah, since I don't
do photojournalism, Um, I'm not trying to do anything that
I don't believe is ethical, right, Um, but let's say that,
(52:02):
for example, here at how stuff works, I've taken photographs
of the staff, and everyone's a while to take. We
have these great big windows that overlook uh the street,
and um, it's nice to post people and from them
because there's a great light in that area. And so
I'll take a portrait of one of our hosts in
front of that window and then i'll upload it onto
(52:24):
the computer. I'll realize, oh, there's some cars on the
road right there. I don't want those cars right there,
so you remove I remove the cars. Or I took
a photograph of a couple of our hosts in front
of the apartment building across the street, and I thought, well,
the name of the apartment building isn't part of our brand,
so I should just take it out. Things like that,
(52:44):
it's just cleaning it up. It's um and things like
that I know happen every day. I think that. And
now photo manipulation is probably a little bit like auto tune,
where you might not know it, but almost every major
release you here has at least a little bit of
auto tune. Yeah, because the original purpose of auto tune
(53:05):
was to be unnoticed. It wasn't meant to be a
a new form of performance. That's how it got that's
what it got turned into. And then you had people
who were behind auto tune saying, well, crap. The whole
purpose of this was to make make to correct little
errors and get people closer to being on key and
(53:26):
on tune without it becoming a noticeable thing. And now
you guys are are are pushing this into something else,
not that that isn't legitimate. I mean, I think it's
always important to recognize the art sometimes takes established processes
or technologies and pushes them in new ways, and that's
how you get new stuff. Yeah, you get the share
(53:46):
effect an auto tune, or you have Andy Warhol making
prints until they deteriorate over and over again on like
a like a screen print, over and over again. But
just like how auto tune tries to find the right
note between two two different notes, tries to get you
to that right note. Uh, I think a lot of
(54:06):
people put their their photographs into a light room or
photoshop and they just try and get it to the
right exposure, the right saturation, uh, color correction, dodging and burning,
which we can talk about in the second episode. Just
small things like that that I think people have become
so accustomed to that if you gave them an image
right out of the camera, they would feel like it
(54:29):
could have been improved upon. Yeah, this to me is
really the fascinating part of this, the idea that as
someone who's who's a casual shutter bug at best, like
I am not known for the making great composition of shots,
I take pictures casually in order to capture moments to remember,
(54:50):
and that's about it. Like, that's that's about as far
as my expertise goes in that area. I have a
deep appreciation for people who have a great understanding of composition,
of lighting, of what needs to happen on the camera
side in order to capture the moment that you intend
to capture, and only that, but what has to happen
on the back end after the photo has been quote
(55:12):
unquote taken in order for you to have the finished
picture represent your vision, especially as an artist. That's that
to me is amazing, Like a lot I think, I
think I often would think of photography the way a
lot of early photographers thought about it, that photography's purpose
is to capture a moment um as close to representing
(55:35):
it in as being real as possible, like like capturing
that real moment forever and fixing it in a medium
so it can stay that way for the end of time.
And I don't necessarily, or at least I didn't think
about the fact that sometimes the point where you push
the shutter button on your camera is just the beginning,
(55:58):
and then you have another process us that follows to
get to the photo that you want that actually represents
your vision. There are definitely two sides of it. I
mean to have the idea of, like you said, getting
a photograph, saving it for history and not touching it,
(56:18):
I think is also very important depending on the case.
It's like when you get the audio of the State
of the Union, or if the President makes an address,
you don't cut it because that that can change context.
You shouldn't do the same thing um with photojournalism, or
(56:39):
at least most people believe that. It's like there was
a famous example in seventy at the Kent State shootings
that there's a picture of a body on the ground
and there's a woman grieving over it, and there was
a pole sticking out from behind her head. Um, and
someone saw that photograph and took the pole out. And
(57:02):
does it change the context of the photograph? Not particularly.
It was done for compositional reasons, to make it more
aesthetically pleasing. One of the things that I learned when
I went to college photophotography is never have a pole
behind someone's head. It's just it's just you don't do it.
It's distracting. And yes, but if it starts there with photojournalism,
(57:23):
if you start by removing a pole, it could only
escalate from there um and you know, you get to
a point where you're like, all right, it was a
pole in this case. All right, it was someone's ring
in this case, which changes the context depending upon the culture,
or it was you know, removing an entire person and
erasing that person's presence from an actual historical moment. I mean,
(57:44):
it does become a slope, right, And if when people
find out, it raises more questions than it ever really answers, sure,
because then you start questioning the motivations behind the action,
and then you think, well, what are your ulterior motives
for making these alterations to this photograph? And uh, you know,
we've explored some of that here. In some cases it
(58:05):
was meant to mislead people specifically, in some cases it
was a matter of ego, uh, and sometimes ego to
the point of of megalomaniac maniake the egos I mean
Stalin and and Mault s Tong and the biggest egos
of the twentieth century learned mostly and yeah, yeah, yeah,
(58:26):
I mean those are big egos and to the point
where if you want someone gone you don't just kill them,
but you erase all record of them. That's insane really
to me. But as far as people who would have
like who would have a history of having photos manipulated, yeah,
(58:46):
it makes total sense that those would be the personalities
that demand these things. And we've also, of course, there
are plenty of examples of other artists and photographers who
have manipulated him, just using pictures of people like those, uh,
in order to lampoon or youth satire or some other
(59:09):
means to make a message. Like there's a famous one, uh,
not a particularly convincing, uh, cut and paste job, but
there was one where it's a picture of of of
someone dressed up with an apron and they're holding a
cleaver and they're about to chop the head off of
a of a bird, a bird that represents France, and
(59:31):
they've cut and paste Hitler's head on top of the
person's head, thus representing Hitler's approach to attacking and and
conquering France. And it was meant as a political statement,
and it wasn't meant to mislead obviously, it wasn't. It wasn't.
The intent wasn't to suggest, like, look at this weird picture.
I got a hitler. It was obviously to make a statement. Yes, yeah,
(59:54):
so lots of different reasons for this. Now this is
really neat because it does show the amount of work
necessary to edit and manipulate photos. Sometimes it meant taking
a risk that you might ruin the negative that you
had created. Not all of these manipulations when you had
to go back to the negative and make some changes, No,
(01:00:14):
all of them turned out great, And there is no
undo button. Yeah, so we have no way of knowing
how many potentially historical images we've lost as a result
of an error made in the manipulation process. I hope
you enjoyed that classic episode of tech stuff. We'll be
back next week with part two. This is another one
(01:00:34):
of those topics that I could easily do an update
too and talk about some of the new tools for
editing photos and videos and more, and how machine learning
and artificial intelligence have greatly enhanced our ability to manipulate
photos to the point where it's hard to trust anything
you see these days in many ways. But we'll be
(01:00:55):
back next week to conclude this two parter, and in
the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics, I should
cover on tech Stuff. Feel free to reach out to me.
One way to do that is to download the i
Heart Radio app. It's free to use. Just navigate over
to the tech Stuff page on I Heart Radios podcast
app and you can leave a message by clicking on
a little microphone icon that lets you leave up to
(01:01:16):
thirty seconds of audio. Please be kind and uh. You
can let me know what you would like me to
talk about on the show, or if you prefer, you
can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for
the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Tech Stuff is
(01:01:38):
an i Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.