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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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.