I don’t know if you’ve been following the blogosphere’s discussion of President-Elect Barack Obama’s supposed presenting of a forged or false birth certificate (technically, “certificate of live birth”) to quash rumors that he is not a natural-born U.S. citizen.
Frankly, I don’t know what to believe on this issue. But I do know that one of the main investigators into the matter, Ron Polarik, has posted a fascinating (if rather long and somewhat repetitive) discussion of digital image creation and manipulation on a web site he is associated with. You can check it out here: “Obama’s ‘Born’ Conspiracy - Forged Images, Phony Photos, and Felony Fraud.”
Clearly, regardless of the ultimate merits of his case, Polarik is a real expert in digital imaging, ditigal image formats, etc. I work with digital images nearly every day, both in my day job and on the side as a WordPress-based entrepreneur, and I learned a lot from reading his essay.
I do have some experience in photo manipulation using Photoshop. Probably most notably, I deleted my family from a photo with such expertness that no one but me (and of course, the “deletees”– my wife and daughter) could tell, even when I printed the image as an 8×10 to enter into a photography contest.
In my case, the reason was simple. I had taken a picture of said wife and daughter posing in front of a restaurant in Guatemala. Nearby, some of the local Guatemalans, many in colorful indigenous garb, were streaming through the front door of the restaurant. And there, off to one side, were my family, grinning for the camera and looking exactly like the tourists they were. If I had left them in, it would have been just another tourist-type snapshot. By taking them out I was able to produce a photo that was a piece of art, if I say so myself.
Fortunately, my wife and daughter were standing against a fairly simple background — a blank wall painted red. There were cracks and dents in the wall, for sure, but nothing as intricate as a sign or painted patterns or anything. Plus, there was enough blank wall showing on either side of them that was able to cover them over with a cloned section of that wall. Then I judiciously used the Photoshop blending tool to smooth out the boundaries between the repeated clone sections. I’m proud of my work on that photo, even if my wife and daughter still have hurt feelings about being wiped out of the picture!
I don’t know if you ever do this, but I am old enough to still have a “gee whiz” attitude toward today’s computer and web technology. Even though I use it every day, it is still all a bit magical to me. That especially goes for the digital image technology that has turned the worlds of photography, graphics and even movies upside-down. But it also applies even to website and blog technology. I am impressed all over again every time I write a post (like this one!) and press “Publish” from within my WordPress software, only to have my words miraculously appear on my life website, for all the world to see.
It is because we have come so far, so fast with all of this technology that we can even be seriously discussing whether or not a President-elect (or rather, his campaign workers) may have forged a birth certificate and then posted it where anyone who wants to can examine it and comment on it. Truly, it’s an exciting if somewhat unsettling world that we inhabit. Gee whiz!
