Keyspan Energy Corp ran an ad in Newsday in which it used this picture (apparently of Long Island fishmongers) to express its commitment to the people of Long Island. The concept was that local businesses should rely on a local company for their electricity. But astute readers soon noticed that the fishmongers were holding up King Salmon, a species found only in the Pacific.

When challenged, Keyspan admitted it had used a stock photo of fishmongers standing in Seattle's Pike Place Market (nowhere near Long Island). It had digitally inserted the words "Mid-Island Fish" onto their aprons. Keyspan subsequently reshot the ad using the owner of a local Long Island fish store. The new ad read, "Want to meet a real fish company?"

In the top image, Bush and a young child are both reading from America: A Patriotic Primer by Lynne Cheney (wife of Vice-President Cheney). But if you look closely, it appears that President Bush is holding his book upside down. An unknown hoaxer has horizontally and vertically flipped the image on the back of the book in Bush's hands. But in doing so, he made a mistake. Compare the book held by the girl to the book Bush is holding. The picture on the right-hand side of Bush's book has been vertically flipped in the wrong direction. (A dark blue spot is close to the spine of Bush's book, but this same spot in the girl's copy is near the left-hand edge of the book.)

The original version of the photo (bottom) was taken in the Summer of 2002 while Bush was visiting George Sanchez Charter School in Houston. It was distributed by the Associated Press.

Politicians doing simple things wrong is a popular theme in political photo hoaxes. In this image, Tom Daschle (a U.S. Senator from South Dakota) appears to be reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while holding the wrong hand over his heart. Captions that accompanied this image read, "Daschle the Patriot (Leftist)" and also:

When this picture first started appearing online, in late 2002, Daschle was serving as Majority leader in the U.S. Senate. Thus he was a highly visible political figure and a natural target for political jokes and smear campaigns. This photo was evidently an attempt to smear him by questioning his intelligence and patriotism. A hoaxer appears to have digitally flipped Daschle's body around along the horizontal axis, reversing his right and left sides (a simple operation using image manipulation software).

Evidence of this horizontal flip: Daschle's jacket is buttoned on the wrong side for a man's jacket. Also, if that is actually his left hand (and not his right hand flipped around) where is his wedding ring?

The New York Times ran this dramatic photo of a young boy of Arabic descent aiming a toy gun outside an Arabian food store in Lackawanna, New York. The scene was near to where an al-Qaeda sleeper cell had allegedly recently operated. The photo was taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Ed Keating. But rival photographers present at the scene accused Keating of staging the shot, claiming he had arranged the scene “like a fashion shoot.” Keating denied the allegations, but was nevertheless forced to resign from the Times.

In late 2002 McDonald's ran a television advertisement in the UK for its new Steak Premiere sandwich. The ad attracted the attention of the UK's Independent Television Commission after it received complaints that the image of the sandwich in the ad was misleading. Viewers noted that the ad showed a bun containing a substantial amount of steak, dressing, peppers and onions. However, the actual sandwich was far less full of ingredients.

The ITC investigated and concluded there was a "disparity between the quantity of toppings against the television advertisements." McDonald's admitted that, in making the ad, its photographers had moved some of the toppings to the edge of the bun to make them more visible.

This is fairly standard practice in the advertising industry. "Food stylists" are employed to carefully stage food to enhance its appearance. Common tricks include shining fruit and vegetables with glycerin, piling pasta on top of mashed potatoes to make it look bigger, putting aspirin in champagne to give it extra fizz, and searing the outside of uncooked burgers with a blowtorch to create the appearance of moist, plump burgers.

McDonald's was ordered to stop running the ad. It stopped serving the sandwich in January 2003.

Photo editors at British GQ digitally massaged Kate Winslet's legs to make her appear taller and skinnier in the cover photo than she really was. They did so despite the fact that in her interview inside the magazine Winslet boasted about being more rounded, saying that all the men she knew "like girls to have an arse on them."

Winslet later claimed the photo editors reduced her legs by a third of their size. "I was pretty proud of how my legs actually looked in the real picture," she was quoted as saying. "I have Polaroids from the shoot and I thought I looked fine." Editor-in-chief Dylan Baker acknowledged the alteration, but claimed it had been done with Winslet's approval. Winslet said, "It just was important to me to let people know that digital retouching happens all the time. It's probably happened to just about every other well-known actress on the face of the planet."

When the space shuttle Columbia exploded upon re-entry on February 1, 2003, no cameras recorded the event. But online, a dramatic series of images of a space shuttle exploding began to circulate. They were said to have been taken "from an Israeli satellite in space."

The pictures were actually screenshots from the opening scene of the Touchstone Pictures movie Armageddon (1998). In the movie the space shuttle Atlantis is struck by meteorite fragments. An unknown hoaxer lifted these images from a DVD of the movie, added the phony caption, and set the pictures loose on the web.

The top photo, showing a British soldier gesturing to a crowd of Iraqi civilians near Basra, ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and Hartford Courant on March 30, 2003. It had been taken the previous day by LA Times staff photographer Brian Walski.

A staffer at the Courant noticed that some figures in the image appeared to have been duplicated. For instance, the back of a person squatting down (visible behind the soldier's knee) was identical to the back of the person directly to the left. The staffer queried the Times's Director of Photography about this, who then contacted Walski. Walski admitted the photo was actually a composite of two other photos (middle and bottom). The LA Times fired him.

In an interview with Photo District News, Walski later explained his state of mind when he created the composite:


The revelation of the altered photo attracted an enormous amount of media attention. This was partly because the scandal occurred at the prestigious LA Times, and partly because it underscored how easy the manipulation of images had become -- so easy that a convincing composite could be created in a few minutes by a photographer working in a war zone.

In early 2003 the SARS epidemic became a matter of intense public concern. Thousands of people sought to protect themselves from airborne germs by wearing surgical masks. In April 2003 a photo (top) appeared online apparently showing the model Eva Herzigova modeling a new Louis Vuitton designer SARS mask.

The image was quickly exposed as a hoax when the original version of the image (bottom) was located. It came from the eluxury online fashion store and showed Herzigova without a mask, modeling only a Louis Vuitton handbag.

The image showing lazy polar bears relaxing outside a suburban home has circulated online since around 2003. It's often captioned "Manitoba Home Security." (Other city names are sometimes substituted.) Obviously no one would want to approach this home.

In reality, the image is a photomontage. The polar bears were cut-and-pasted from an image (below) titled "Bad Boys of the Arctic" taken in Hudson Bay, Canada by nature and wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen. The original has also circulated online (unattributed) with the caption "Lazy Polar Bears."