Hoax Museum Blog: Photos

The Case of the Leaping and Mating Giraffe —

When I first saw this image, I immediately wondered whether giraffes can jump. I did some googling and eventually found Giraffes by Nicole Helget in which she addresses this question:

A giraffe can also jump, clearing heights of up to five feet (1.5 m). This capability is important, now that many cattle fences have been built in Africa. The neck helps propel the giraffe over obstacles. To jump, the giraffe first pulls its neck back, putting most of its weight over the hind legs. Then it thrusts the neck forward, lifts its front legs, and pushes off with its hind legs.

Knowing that giraffes can jump then made me wonder whether the image could possibly be real — though it looks like the giraffe is leaping higher than five feet. But it didn't take me long to track down the source of the picture. It was created by "c_kick" as part of a giraffe-themed b3ta.com photoshop challenge. (It's also posted on c_kick's personal website, totalleh.com.)

But this is where the photo investigation got a bit strange, because in the course of tracking down the source of the image I found an older picture from which c_kick presumably cut-and-pasted the leaping giraffe. And this older image is more puzzling than the leaping giraffe one. It shows a giraffe that looks like it's trying to mate with a donkey.


The giraffes in the two pictures are definitely one and the same. That's easy to see when the two photos are placed side-by-side.


And the mating-giraffe picture is definitely older than the leaping-giraffe one, which c_kick created in July 2010. There are discussions of the mating-giraffe pic that date back to early 2008. Most of these "discussions" are along the lines of, "OMG Epic FAIL!!!!" But I did find one intelligent discussion of the picture posted by Darren Naish on the Tetrapod Zoology blog in November 2008.

Darren notes that attempted interspecies matings are far more common than people think, especially in captivity. But in the comments left on his post, people note that the giraffe in the picture appears to be a female. Therefore, it wouldn't be mating with the donkey. Though it might be a case of "assertive dominance" or "fake humping". But others are doubtful that the giraffe and donkey are even making contact, since the donkey seems strangely unconcerned about what's happening. Forced perspective could be making the two animals appear closer than they really were.

And finally, the question is raised of whether this mating-giraffe picture is even real. Is it photoshopped? Felicia asks: "Where the hell are the giraffe's front legs? It's not on its knees and the legs are not splayed - they point straight into the ground."

That's a good question. Where are the giraffe's front legs?

So it could be that both images featuring the giraffe are photoshopped. Though I'm not yet completely convinced the mating one is. I suspect that the angle of the shot could be hiding the giraffe's legs — for instance, if the ground on which the giraffe is standing slopes downward. To fully settle the question, one would need some kind of fancy forensic photo-analysis software, which I don't have.

So that's where my research into the leaping and mating giraffe ends. But while I'm on the subject of giraffes, here are some other fake giraffe pictures I found while browsing through giraffe images on google:






Posted: Tue May 01, 2012.   Comments (2)

Driving into the mouth of the tunnel —

It would be cool if there really was a tunnel entrance somewhere in the world that looked like this. But this is one of those brought-to-you-by-photoshop images. The original is an image showing a billboard created in March 2007 by the Austrian ad agency Demner, Merlicek & Bergmann for the restaurant chain Oldtimer. (link: adsoftheworld.com)



What's puzzling me is whether the original image is itself photoshopped? Did this Oldtimer billboard ever exist in real life, or is the photo just a concept piece?

I can't find any pictures showing the Oldtimer billboard from a different angle. I can't find any sources that list the specific road where it was placed. Nor can I find news sources from 2007 that discuss the billboard. I also think it's strange that this was an Austrian campaign, and yet the writing is in English.

All of which make me suspect that the original image is a photoshopped concept piece. Though I'm not sure. It could be that I can't find any more info about the ad because all the info is in German.
Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012.   Comments (8)

Fast-Food Tattoo Guy —

The "Fast-Food Tattoo Guy" image has been floating around the internet since 2009, at least. It's not a very good fake. Which is to say, it doesn't appear that many people have been led to believe, on the basis of this photo, that some large, cheeseburger-loving man actually decided to tattoo himself with the logos of fast-food restaurants.

Nevertheless, I'm always curious about where these fake photos originally come from. In the case of this photo, I tracked down the original to a series of photos taken by photographer Philip Greenspun at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2005. He took several shots of this guy sitting on the beach, eating his food, and listening to the music. He titled them, "fat shirtless guy eating cheeseburger."

Greenspun seems to have an ongoing interest in taking pictures of overweight Americans eating. For instance, he has a series called Fat People Eating in Epcot. And here he describes why he's interested in photographing fat people eating:

Most of it is that I think that better diet pills will be developed some time within the next 100 years.... The photos will then become a curiosity for people in the year 2100.

I don't know who added the tattoos to Greenspun's Newport Jazz Fest picture.


Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012.   Comments (0)

Bouncing Bear —

This is one of those photos that looks so surreal you'd think it has to be photoshopped, but it's real. It was taken earlier today in Colorado. Although it looks like the bear might be bouncing on a trampoline, it's actually falling onto a thick mat:

Bear tranquilized in tree near Williams Village
cuindependent.com

The bear managed to climb up a tree near the dorms where it stayed for about two and a half hours. Wildlife officials were able to safely tranquilize the bear at 10:17 a.m. and the bear fell onto mats provided by the Recreation Center at approximately 10:28 a.m.
"[The bear] was tranquilized by the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department and it fell onto some mats that the Rec Center provided," Huff said. "It is now in a cage and it will be relocated at a higher elevation."

Posted: Thu Apr 26, 2012.   Comments (3)


Long-Tongue Girl — Exhibit A:


This image has been floating around the internet for quite a while. Over four years, I would guess, which is a lifetime in internet years.

I don't know why it caught my attention, but it did, and I decided to see if I could find any information about it. Or rather, although it's obvious the picture has been photoshopped, I was curious how much it had been altered.

I soon dug up a second (seemingly earlier) version of the picture. Exhibit B:



The girl's tongue is shorter here, but it's still very long. So is this the original photo? Or has it also been shopped? I don't know, but my suspicion is that it's the original. Which means the girl in the picture really does have a very long tongue. Who this girl is, I have no idea. But I wonder if she's aware that she's famous on the internet as 'long-tongue girl'?
Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012.   Comments (4)

The ghost of Janis Joplin attends a party — Posted by "klove614" on reddit: "Going through pictures from the other night...holy shit"



Reddit users quickly pointed out that the ghost in the background bears a strong resemblance to this poster of Janis Joplin:


Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2012.   Comments (1)

Real or Fake: picture of Hindu man with knife sticking through his neck —

A picture taken by Reuters photographer Rupak De Chowdhuri. The Reuters caption states:
A Hindu devotee with his neck pierced with a knife attends the "Chadak" ritual at Krishanadevpur village, north of Kolkata April 13, 2012. Hundreds of Hindu devotees attend the ritual, held to worship the Hindu deity of destruction Lord Shiva, on the last day of the Bengali calendar year. The photographer was unable to check the veracity of the action of this devotee.

The options are:
  1. This guy really does have a large knife sticking through his neck. In which case, he must have been in pretty bad shape whenever he pulled the knife out.
  2. It's one of those fake magician's prop knives.
I don't have a definitive answer, but given that the knife coming out of his neck is bent at a different angle than the knife going into his neck, I think fake' is the correct answer.
Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2012.   Comments (10)

Setting The Clock Back — A nice example of the forced perspective illusion. Photo taken October 28, 1960. (found on eBay)


"Careful placement by photographer gives illusion that Aileen Gallagher is setting clock on tower of Chicago's Wrigley Building as Illinois and other sections of nation prepare for return to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 A.M. this coming Sunday. Aileen, Trans World Airlines hostess, is standing on ledge about two blocks from clock."

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2012.   Comments (0)

Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Breasts Disappear Before Our Eyes — In an ad that ran in Entertainment Weekly, Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts were noticeably smaller than they were in the same ad that ran just about everywhere else (including, briefly, on this site). I suspect this was done by some marketing person in order to give bloggers an excuse to write about Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts, and post comparison photos. I fell for the ruse. (via Huffington Post)


Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012.   Comments (4)

Ridiculously Photogenic Guy vs. Gorgeous Guy — If you follow internet memes at all, you're going to be aware of 'Ridiculously Photogenic Guy'. The title has been attached to 25-year-old Zeddie Little of New York. A picture of him was taken while he was running a 10k race in South Carolina. He seemed to look upbeat and well-composed, while everyone else looked like they were suffering. Someone uploaded the picture to reddit, with the comment, "My friend calls him 'Mr Ridiculously Photogenic Guy'". The image and title promptly went viral, making Little an overnight internet celebrity.


Ridiculously Photogenic Guy

This immediately reminded me of the Gorgeous Guy phenomenon, from way back in 2001, in which a guy's picture was uploaded to San Francisco's Craiglist with the comment, "Gorgeous Guy @ 4th and Market at the MUNI/Amtrak Bus Stop (Mon-Fri)." The Gorgeous Guy's picture soon went viral, resulting in the real-life Gorgeous Guy being tracked down and invited to appear on CNN, The Tonight Show, etc.


Gorgeous Guy

The punchline of the Gorgeous Guy story, however, was that his initial burst of internet popularity turned out to have been artificially engineered. David Cassel of the San Francisco Bay Guardian discovered that the initial flood of messages promoting and gushing about the "Gorgeous Guy" all traced back to the same IP address — which was the address of the company where Gorgeous Guy worked. Cassel suspected that Gorgeous Guy had been promoting himself, though Gorgeous Guy himself insisted it had been his co-workers playing a prank on him.

There's absolutely no indication that Ridiculously Photogenic Guy's popularity was artificially goosed up in any way. In fact, Zeddie Little seems to be trying his best to avoid his unasked-for celebrity status. But it is odd how these internet memes echo and repeat themselves.

Incidentally, after I wrote about the Gorgeous Guy incident in the book version of The Museum of Hoaxes, Gorgeous Guy contacted me, and I continue to get updates from him every few years. Last I heard, if I remember correctly, he was working as a real-estate agent somewhere.
Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2012.   Comments (0)

The Patriarch’s Expensive Gold Watch — Sloppy Photoshopping: The Russian Orthodox Church recently posted a picture on its website of Patriarch Kirill during a 2009 meeting with Vladimir Putin. The photo wouldn't have caused any controversy — except that bloggers noticed a difference between the Patriarch's arm and the reflection of the arm on the shiny surface of the table. The reflection showed an expensive watch on his wrist. Oops. The watch was a gold Breguet watch valued at $30,000.
Links: BBC, ABC News. (via Accipiter in the Hoax Forum)


BEFORE


AFTER

Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012.   Comments (0)

A Bullfighter Repents — The following photo and caption has recently begun to circulate online. It's all over Facebook.

bullfighter

"And suddenly, I looked at the bull. He had this innocence... that all animals have in their eyes, and he looked at me with this pleading. It was like a cry for justice, deep down inside of me. I describe it as being like a prayer - because if one confesses, it is hoped, that one is forgiven. I felt like the worst shit on earth."


This photo shows the collapse of Torrero Alvaro Munera, as he realized in the middle of his last fight... the injustice to the animal. From that day forward he became an opponent of bullfights.

I haven't been able to figure out where the photo originally came from, but it definitely doesn't show Alvaro Munera's moment of epiphany during a bullfight. Munera is an ex-bullfighter who's become an animal-rights activist. But (as described in an article about him on open.salon.com) his career ended not from a moment of zen communion with a bull, but rather in 1984 when a bull caught him and tossed him in the air, resulting in a spinal-cord injury that left Munera paralyzed.

I've seen another version of the photo and quotation that attributes the words to "Fabian Oconitrillo Gonzalez". But I have no idea who he might be. If he's a bullfighter, I haven't been able to find out anything about him.
Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2012.   Comments (4)

Photoshopping the Classics — Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano (great name... can that be the name she was born with?) has created a series of works that comment on the media obsession with photoshopping models to look thin and flawless. She's taken famous classical nudes and made them thinner. So Botticelli's Venus gets slimmed down for the beach, as does Francesco Hayez's Venus. The New York Daily News quotes her as saying:

Art is always in search of the perfect physical form. It has evolved through history, from the classical proportions of ancient Greece to the prosperous beauty of the Renaissance, to the spindly look of models like Twiggy and the athletic look of our own time.





Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2012.   Comments (1)

What Was The First Ever Photoshopped Image? — The Daily Mail recently posted an article online about the early history of photo fakery. The Daily Mail doesn't exactly have a reputation for quality journalism, so it shouldn't be that surprising that the article starts off with an historical error. It claims that an image (shown below) of Abraham Lincoln posing in a 'heroic' stance "could be the first ever Photoshopped image."



I understand the Daily Mail is using 'photoshopped' as a generic term to mean an image altered by darkroom tricks. But even so, the Lincoln image hardly qualifies as the first photographic fake. For one thing, the Daily Mail dates the image to 1860, but I believe the image really dates to 1864 or later. (I have a brief article about the image in the photo archive. It was a case of an unknown photographer pasting Lincoln's head onto the body of a portrait of John Calhoun.)

So what would actually be the first ever 'photoshopped' image?

A photo taken by Hippolyte Bayard in 1840, "Portrait of the Photographer as a Drowned Man," is generally acknowledged to be the first 'fake' photo. But it wasn't a case of darkroom trickery. Bayard simply staged the scene by posing as a suicide victim, and then he wrote a false caption claiming the photo showed himself after having drowned.



The earliest photos, created by the daguerrotype or direct-positive method, didn't lend themselves to darkroom alteration, because they didn't produce a negative. One positive print was created, and that was it.

It was the calotype method that really ushered in the era of darkroom trickery, because it created a (paper) negative that the photographer could alter and use to produce as many positive prints as he wanted. William Henry Fox Talbot invented the calotype method in 1841, but it took a while to gain popularity, for a variety of legal and technical reasons. During the 1850s, the calotype was improved upon by the collodion process, that produced a glass negative.

Oscar Rejlander is credited as being the first photographer to recognize the extent to which negatives could be manipulated in the darkroom in order to create entirely new images. He pioneered the art of combination printing -- that is, combining multiple photographs into one -- which later came to be known as photomontage. This is the technique people are generally referring to when they talk about images being photoshopped.

In 1857, he produced The Two Ways of Life (below) -- a combination print consisting of 32 images stitched together. This might qualify as the first photoshopped image. Although photoshopped implies fake, and The Two Ways of Life wasn't fake because Rejlander never claimed it was a real scene. He was using photographic techniques to create something that looked like a painting.



I think spirit photographs might qualify as the first ever use of 'photoshop' techniques for deliberate fakery. The idea that photographic tricks could be used to produce 'ghosts' in images was first suggested by Sir David Brewster in 1856. His idea was that the long exposure times required by the collodion process could be exploited by having someone quickly walk into the frame of the picture during the exposure, then out again. Their image would appear to be ghostly in the subsequent photograph.

Two years later, the London Stereoscopic Company used this technique to produce an image it titled, "The Ghost in the Stereoscope." Though it didn't claim this was a real ghost photo.



Three years later, in 1861, William Mumler of New York realized you could also use double exposures to create ghosts. That is, if you used a poorly cleaned glass negative on which a faint image already existed, this would create a ghost image in a subsequent photograph. He used this technique repeatedly, to great profit. Below is one of his first spirit photos from 1861.



So perhaps Mumler is the first true photo faker. Although there were so many photographs being produced by the late 1850s, I wouldn't be surprised if there are other, earlier deliberate fakes that I'm not aware of.
Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012.   Comments (2)

The 1% Tip Hoax — Last week an image showing the "tip" left by a rich banker who had dined at a Newport Beach restaurant spread around the internet. The financial tip was slightly less than 1%, on a bill of over $100, but the patron also left a life-advice tip: "GET A REAL JOB".


Naturally, the image provoked the customary rage reaction from netizens.

The image originally was posted on a blog called "Future Ex-Banker" run by an anonymous blogger who said he worked in the corporate office of a bank for a boss who represented "everything wrong with the financial industry." He further claimed of this boss:

So proudly does he wear his 1% badge of honor that he tips exactly 1% every time he feels the server doesn't sufficiently bow down to his Holiness. Oh, and he always makes sure to include a "tip" of his own.

The image has now proven to be a hoax. The owner of the restaurant, True Food Kitchen, searched through their receipts and found the original copy, which included neither the stingy tip nor the insulting piece of advice. The "Future Ex-Banker" blog (futureexbanker.wordpress.com) has been taken down.


I gotta say, the original image was a pretty good photoshop job. I'm guessing that the hoaxer scanned the original receipt, digitally erased some of the information, then printed out a new copy, wrote the new "tip" on it, and took a picture of it. That would be easier than doing the alteration entirely digitally.

I'm also curious whether the hoaxer was a liberal or a conservative. Given that the hoaxer had to know that the hoax would eventually be exposed, it makes me think this might have been black propaganda by a conservative, trying to make it look like a liberal/progressive hoax.

Links: Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Smoking Gun.
Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012.   Comments (5)

Clayton Sotos, Fartographer — Someone has gone to a bunch of trouble to make it seem as if Dell produced an ad featuring "Visual Innovator" Clayton Sotos. The ad has high production values, and there's an accompanying website showcasing some of Sotos's work. The joke is that Sotos photographs people farting.

Dell insists they're not responsible for the ad. They posted this statement on their twitter page: "This video is in no way affiliated with Dell, but it's great to see creative professionals get inspiration from using our products. Our dell.com/takeyourownpath program is all about celebrating people who take their own professional path. Regarding this parody, we consider imitation to be the sincerest form of flattery."

Gizmodo claims that music and media producer Christian Heuer is behind the mock ad. (links: gizmodo.com, money.msn.co.nz)




Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2012.   Comments (0)

Should disclaimers be required for photoshopped ads? — Rep. Katie Hobbs has introduced a bill into the Arizona state legislature that would require advertisers to put the following disclaimer on advertisements if the image in the ad was "photoshopped" (link: zacentral.com):

"Postproduction techniques were made to alter the appearance in this advertisement. When using this product, similar results may not be achieved."

Similar legislation has been introduced in the UK and France, its purpose being to try to counteract the social pressure on people, particularly young girls, to feel the need to look perfect -- to remind them that the way models look in ads isn't reality.

The problem, of course, is that every ad nowadays uses digital enhancements of some kind to improve pictures. So every ad would have to carry the disclaimer, muting its effect.

Also, why focus on post-production techniques, when pre-production techniques (lighting, focus, makeup) can be just as deceptive?

But having said that, I do sympathize with the spirit of the legislation. If a company says that their product can remove wrinkles or blemishes, and they show a picture of a model with perfect skin, it does seem deceptive if that model's face was made perfectly smooth by photoshop, not by use of the product.

It's the old problem that was raised in the Sandpaper Test case back in the early 1960s. When does the use of photographic tricks by advertisers cross the line from enhancement of a product to outright deception?
Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012.   Comments (3)

Beyonce had her baby. Satan is on Earth. — On Jan. 11, TMZ posted a photo of the sign outside the Beulah Hill Baptist Church, which apparently bore a nice message inspired by the recent birth of Beyonce's baby: "BEYONCE HAD HER BABY. SATAN IS ON EARTH."

<# some text #>


According to TMZ, the pastor at that church told them that vandals had placed the message there, and that it had been taken down promptly.

However, the pastor, Rev. Curtis Barbery, is denying he ever told TMZ this. He gave an interview to the Fayetteville Observer in which he insisted the sign hadn't been vandalized and that the photo was a fake. He said, “It’s never been on our sign because our sign stays locked and the same phrase has been on it since Thanksgiving. Only one man has the key to it.”

But TMZ continues to insist the photo is real (though they won't say how they got it), and that the pastor DID tell them the sign was vandalized.

Most people seem to be inclined to believe the pastor, not TMZ. Mainly because it's so easy to photoshop fake messages onto signs. To illustrate the point, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution posted this photo on their blog:


Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2012.   Comments (5)

Sounds of the Apocalypse, aka Strange Sounds Heard Around the World — MadCarlotta sent me an interesting video:



The premise of the video (which has over 1 million views) is that people around the world are hearing eerie groaning sounds that seem to rise up from the ground and echo through the sky. My first thought was that it sounds like the noise my tankless water heater makes on cold days. So if anyone in La Mesa is hearing eerie noises echoing through the neighborhood, I'm the culprit.

Is the 'strange sounds' video a hoax? Seems to be. Some of the youtube comments point out that you can hear the exact same bird noises at three separate moments (in segments supposedly shot in different parts of the world): at 0:47, 10:35 and 13:38. Which suggests the audio has been dubbed over the video.

A whole slew of similar videos can be found on youtube. So whoever is behind this has put some work into making it seem as if there's all kinds of people hearing these sounds. But the entire 'strange sounds' movement seems to trace back to a single site: strangesoundsinthesky.com, which launched in Sept. 2011. The guy posting on strangesoundsinthesky.com identifies himself only as "Jay Man," and the site itself was registered anonymously through Domains By Proxy. Hoaxers always love anonymity.

I don't know why someone is trying to make people believe that the "sounds of the apocalypse" are being heard around the world. The obvious suspect would be that it's a marketing campaign of some kind. I'm sure we'll find out in time.
Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2012.   Comments (28)

Mitt Romney gets a shoeshine — In recent days, a photo of Mitt Romney that appears to show him getting a shoe shine as his private jet waits has been spreading around the internet. It's been popular with anyone who doesn't much like Romney because it seems to capture the swanky lifestyle he enjoys as a 0.001 percenter.

romney shoeshine

But, in reality, this photo is a case of 'real picture, false caption'. The picture dates to 2008 and actually shows Romney sitting for a security check before boarding a plane in Denver, Colorado. The guy in the red jacket is waving a security wand over Romney's shoe. Not giving him a shoe shine.

Of course, the scene still depicts the lifestyle of the one-percent, because most of us don't get personalized security checks on the tarmac in front of our plane. Instead, we have to remove our shoes and wait like cattle in long security lines. Link: NPR.org
Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2012.   Comments (1)

Page 3 of 25 pages  < 1 2 3 4 5 >  Last ›