Altered Image Blog Entry

People were reporting on the OJ Simpson trial in June 1994. Two of the articles that made it to print included 2 very different images. TIME used a darkened photo of OJ which the photo illustrator said gave it a more dramatic feel while Newsweek used an unedited image. I don’t think it was ethical or warranted to adjust the image in this way because the illustrator should’ve darkened the background and left OJ Simpson unedited. It would’ve captured the darker tone that they said they were going for. Instead it seems racially charged.

This photo of the uncles of two children who died in an Israeli airstrike carrying them to a mosque was accused of being fake. Due to over-editing like the vivid colors and lack of shadows in the alleyway many people thought i was photoshopped. I don’t think this is ethical because it takes away from the problem at hand and makes the severity of the situation in Gaza City seem less real.

The cover of the economist displaying the president at the time seemingly contemplating how to handle the BP oil spill conveniently left out the two people he was with. In the original picture he is standing with an Admiral of the coast guard and the local parish president on a beach. While I feel like the picture is warranted because the magazine doesn’t change the way Obama looks it’s not really ethical. The altered image paints a very different picture of Obama looking defeated where in the original he’s shown listening to the people he’s with.

I would be able to justify photoshopping an image if it transformed the meaning of the material/repurposed it. Also, it shouldn’t be photoshopped so that its completely different but enough so that its repurposed while still maintaining most of the original image.

Quotes

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

Dr. Seuss

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure… but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”

Francis

 “Close don’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

Robinson

Fonts

Baskerville- John Baskerville created the Baskerville type-font in an effort to create a font more impressive than the “caslon” typefaces that were commonplace at the time. This font was created in 1757 in Birmingham, England and differentiates itself from other fonts with its almost horizontal serifs and high contrast. I like how clean and aesthetically pleasing Baskerville looks while also maintaining a professional appearance. The horizontal serifs help give it this look and other serif fonts aren’t as appealing to me because they try to do too much. I would use this font in body paragraphs & for the main content on a page because it’s easy to view and stands out.

Gotham- Tobias Frere-Jones designed the Gotham font and released it in 2000. It’s a modern adaptation of the 20th century Gothic font. Obama used this font during his 2008 campaign and it’s received praise for its clean look and modern design. Gotham is sans-serif and has relatively broad letters. Despite its lack of serifs it maintains a personality. I’d use this font for headlines or for content on a page that has a more casual or youthful audience. Sans-serif fonts like Gotham have a simple and modern approach which makes it perfect in these scenarios.

Font Poem

I chose the saying “Our greatest fear should not be of failure … but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” by Francis Chan because it was the first saying I found that stood out from the other ones and it’s a saying I either haven’t heard before or don’t remember hearing. Also, I think I was coming from a class where the professor assigned some busywork for homework and this saying made a lot of sense at the time.

I used a few different fonts. They are: Myriad Pro (of), Californian FB (Matter/That/Don’t/in), Broadway (Really), Baskerville Old Face (Life/Greatest), Agency FB (Things/at/Our), Impact (succeeding), Brush Script MT (But), Bradley Hand ITC (Be/Of/Failure), Bauhaus 93 (Should/Not), Magneto (Fear). A lot of the fonts I chose, I chose because I was playing around with the fonts and I wanted to see how they looked together. I didn’t have a goal in mind when picking out the fonts i wanted to use. However, some of the fonts like Impact which I used for the word “succeeding” I chose in order for the important words to stand out.

The words are arranged in the same way in which they are written from left to right and top to bottom. I wanted to keep it this way so that it would make sense even if the fonts and tilt’s I used on the words didn’t work out well. There’s some effects in this design. For instance I rotated “Fear” clockwise so that it would stand out and add some more character. Also, I used a slant on “That” so that it would put emphasis on the bottom line of the project. I tried to color code the words so that every word looked different from the others, but also so words that related to each other would have similar colors, just in different shades.

The only problems I had when creating the font poem were forgetting to save it to thawspace and not uploading it before the desktop was wiped. It only took about 10 minutes to re-do it but now I won’t forget to save all my work to the right places/upload right away. I’m most proud of the flow of the words. Even though they sometimes look like they’re all over the place, I think people looking at it for more than a second would be able to see it how it’s supposed to be.

Contact Sheet

For the first row of pictures I adjusted the dots per inch (dpi) for each image. The first image is the dpi that computer screens show images at (72). However, if it was printed out at 72 dpi it wouldn’t look the same. This is because the dpi should be at 300 minimum for images to be clear when printed. In order to get here I uploaded the image from the folder that was in thawspace into photoshop and went to the image heading at the top of photoshop. Then I clicked on image size and unchecked resample because that upscales the image and lowers the quality. After that I entered the desired dpi into the resolution box to change the resolution of the image. I repeated these steps for the 600dpi and 1200dpi images. At a higher dpi the printed image will look clearer but will also be smaller on the page.

In the second row only 2 of my photoshop files carried over to the contact sheet. For whatever reason I had a similar issue for a lot of my issues when converting them from photoshop to the app we used to put the mall together. I have the black and white (grayscale) image and the RGB image. In order to get the black and white picture I used the original rgb image in photoshop and went to channel mixer, checked the monochrome box, and adjusted the different color sliders until it looked right.

The third row focused on the orientation of images. Using the stock photo of the sailboat from the class folder, I cropped the picture using the crop tool in photoshop so that the boat was the main focus of the photo and some of the extra stuff was cropped out. The boat was also put into a focus point based on the rule of thirds. After that, I flipped the boat so that it was on the opposite side of the picture in the crop 2 photo. Using the image size feature I made the picture wider and less tall for a landscape photo. I lowered the width and increased the height for the portrait picture.

In the 4th row theres two closeup images and two wide angle images of fenway park. To get the closeup images I zoomed in on the parts of the image I wanted the close-ups for and cropped those parts out. I stretched the image in order to get the two versions for the wide angles.

The 5th row deals with representation and abstract images In order to make the abstract images I resized the original image so that it looked like the plant in the picture was also a face. The other abstract image was a closeup of the plant which looks like bamboo shoots. I didn’t change much about the representational images because they’re meant to look like original picture.

Purpose was the main topic for the last row. I looked up a a picture of musical artist, Lil Uzi Vert, and used different photoshop filters to change the way the picture looks. I used 5 filters in total and layered two of them on two the four images. The filters used are: cutout, filterflow, grain, puzzle, and journalistic.