These are (probably) my last words on the faking of photographs
for use as evidence in legal proceedings.
Someone mentioned the enormous amount of work involved in faking a
photograph. But I wasn't talking about creating some totally
fictional scene out of whole cloth, like something from "The
Matrix," for instance. What I refer to are subtle changes made in
otherwise accurate photographs.
For example, a case we recently tried involved a guy suing a night
club, claiming he was roughed up by a couple of employees, a
bouncer and a bartender, and tossed out for no good reason. As
part of his evidence, he submitted photographs of himself
shirtless, taken a couple of days after the incident, showing his
alleged injuries: a few scrapes and bruises and a relatively minor
black eye and a slightly fat lip. It would take little skill, and
almost no time, with Photoshop to turn those minor boo-boos into
some pretty serious looking injuries. That's the kind of thing
I'm talking about.
Little things can make significant differences, depending on the
circumstances and exactly what the photograph is offered to show.
For instance, pictures of an accident scene can be altered just
slightly, yet sometimes a subtle change is enough to raise doubt
about the fault of one or the other of the parties.
As an example of such chicanery, you might look at my TOPE 10
photo. I completely removed two distracting signs, a speed limit
sign and one directing traffic to a parking area, from the road
running along the left of the picture. Bet you can't tell where
they were, even now that you know they were once there. (And on a
scale of 0 to 10, my skill level with any photo editing program is
less than 1.)
And as for making a "fake" negative or transparency from the
digital, you can forget that. Unless you thought to do so ahead
of time, you'll have about one minute, two if you fake a coughing
fit, to think up a response to the challenge to your digital
photographs and the request that the original negatives or
transparencies be produced, and you sure won't be given a recess
and time to go make them. Besides, under increasing magnification
of a piece of film, I would expect to start to see grain
structure, not pixels, and if I saw pixels, you would be in some
deep, deep doo-doo.
The truth is, people are just plain sneaky sometimes. Keep your
eyes open. Many, many things are not as they seem.
Walt
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