I just had a closer look at this book. It does contain some good sections and observations, like this:Flabbergasted wrote:nonhocapito,nonhocapito wrote:Another possibly interesting read on the subject:
Adobe Photoshop Forensics
Sleuths, Truths, and Fauxtography
from http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-F ... 1598634054
...this one can be found in electronic format via, er, many channels. .
I tried to find one of those channels, but no luck so far. Any way you could give me a hand?
Edit: Just had a lucky strike ... no need any longer!
But, not surprisingly, the book downplays the massive proportions of media fakery over the past century by not providing any examples with truly damning implications. For example, in a small section on NASA´s moon pictures, the only issues mentioned (not really discussed) are "light reflection from the lunar surface" (to explain away clearly lit objects in the shade) and "visual clues and angles of view of distant objects". The author, whose credentials include...The Neverending Fraud
Outside the scientific community, we don’t always realize how serious such fakery can be. But bad science contributes to the misuse of millions of dollars in government and corporate grants. It misrepresents reality to the public, creating panic or prompting bad political and social decisions. It can delay medical cures by misdirecting effort and funding to fantasyland.
And once a bad paper gets published, it lives a kind of half-life in the community. Even if the authors retract a paper (or are asked to retract it, which is much the same thing but considerably more embarrassing), the paper is still searchable online and continues to live in its original form in libraries and labs. Doctoral students looking for citations to bolster their own work may continue to cite it.
...apparently found no examples of fraud worthy of her attention in the entire collection of moon imagery. Here is the full text of the section (highlights added):Associate Director of the graduate program in Digital Media and the undergraduate program in Multimedia Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Formerly she was the Technical Director for the Department of Visual Arts, and she has been teaching courses that integrate digital tools with design and creative imaging for 20 years.
The short section whitewashing NASA´s moon pics is followed by a quite long section debunking UFOlogy and urban legends. Perfect. Let´s get all the kooky theories together in one place.One Small Step
If you were beyond preschool age in 1969, chances are you remember a summer night in front of the TV, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. It was the culmination of several days of anticipation and excitement that began when Apollo 11 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 16 (Figure 9-2).
Surprise! As much as 10 percent of the American public believes that the event never took place—that it was an elaborate hoax supported by falsifying everything from sound transmissions to rock samples. The argument: that the flight and landing were technologically beyond NASA’s capabilities. Recognizing the impossibility, the government took the money earmarked for the moon flight and spent it on faking the event and bribing people into complicity. The motive: Cold War politics and national prestige.
There are several variations on the Apollo hoax theory. They range from the absolutist—everything about the event was faked—to the hybrid theory—the capsule was shot into space but didn’t go all the way to the moon, and the astronauts taped the landing in Nevada before the flight. Although the theorists bring up everything from missing telemetry tapes to moon temperatures and radiation, the published pictures from the landing are the most frequently cited evidence.
Is there any support for these accusations? Well, not based on the photographs—the arguments lack a photographer’s understanding of light. For example, most of the bullet points for a faked landing claim that there would be only one source of light on the moon. If so, an astronaut standing in a shadow should be totally dark. Since you can see the astronauts clearly when standing in the shadow of the lunar module, there must have been a second light source.
They’re right—there is a second light source: reflected light from the first one. Think of being on the beach on a sizzling hot summer day, and how much brighter and harsher everything appears because of the reflection from the sand. The lunar surface would reflect light as well, with no atmosphere to dampen the effect. Note that reflected light is the only way to explain the secondary shadows on the backpack, inner arm, and lower legs of Buzz Aldrin in Figure 9-3.
Another claim is that NASA used a backdrop of mountains, and then they erred and took a picture without the lunar module in place (Figure 9-4)[the lunar lander is not even shown in this figure]. But two things stand in the way of this idea. The first is that there is no lunar atmosphere, so we don’t have the same visual clues of distance that we do on Earth, where the atmosphere makes distant objects appear fuzzy and blue. The second is a standard of observation that anyone who has ever driven down a flat road in the desert has seen. You have to go quite some distance toward a far-away object before it feels like you’ve made any progress toward it.
After 30 years and many administrative and political changes, not to mention several follow-up landings tracked around the world, scientists of every political stripe agree that the landing, and all the moon visits, really did take place. But as long as the photographs exist and the element of mistrust remains, some people will disbelieve.
Another section provides...
a lovely example of how a real image takes on a hint of the faux, without the edit of a single glorious pixel.
The book shows how several images of the "extremely photogenic" Helix Nebula are combined to make the picture we see in school books and science magazines. According to Baron, it´s...
Subsequently, a single example of a fake 9/11 picure is given: The silly "tourist guy" hoax!...a beautiful illustration that’s a tribute to the marriage of art and science.
Anything else we should know about, Ms. Baron?
Nope...