Tuesday, September 19, 2006

The camera never lies

"The camera never lies", a statement that was never completely true. From the moment people started posing and photographers entered the darkroom photographs lied. Sure the subject may have had to pose in a misleading way, or the photographer had to alter the photographs exposure but in general the camera itself just took an honest shot, as it saw it. Light in, negative out. What happened before or after was never really the cameras fault.

Now as time went by it became easier to make a photograph lie. Type the name of any famous actress into your favourite search engine and you'll get back a host of images of them in various compromising poses that will clearly demonstrate how convincingly a photograph can be made to lie. Any of us can now be inserted into holiday snaps of the worlds landmarks, or if a family member misses a wedding just slot them in at the back of the shot and in a few years no one will remember who was actually there. 10 minutes in Photoshop and I can be playing golf on the surface of the moon with Tiger Woods and Kate Beckinsale.

I guess it was inevitable but the camera itself has finally given in and can now tell the odd fib or in this particular case a dishonesty for the sake of peace. HPs newest digital camera can now tell the worlds most common lie. "No honey, you bum does not look big in that..." They now come equipped with "slimming effect" to make people in photographs look thinner. I'm sure it will lead to happier holiday memories for many people but it's a sad day to see the camera abandon its morals and join the rest of us. Where will it all end? If my new camera was just a couple of years more advanced maybe I could have had Kate automatically inserted into my Australia photographs to make my friends back home jealous. Soon we'll never know what the truth was.

[via Boing Boing]

2 comments:

Unknown said...

hey, your coments about photography r really cool.
and im your first coment

raven said...

hey your comments really helped me