My Photo That Lies

I chose a picture of Nancy Pelosi and a picture of a random convict to manipulate. In 2009 Nancy proposed a law that those without health insurance would be fined and incarcerated for up to 5 years. This manipulation was kind of a play on that situation in which she is the one going to prison for such a ludicrous idea. The two pictures I used were just found on Google images. I manipulated the images by first cropping the mugshot as it had too much space in the background. Then I got Pelosi's face out of the second image using the magic lasso tool and moved it to the first image. I cloned the chin and some excess hair a bit to make it seem a little more realistic. I desaturated the face and made it a little darker. Then I selected the skin of the convict and messed with the saturation and brightness until it was just about the same color as Nancy's face. I manipulated it in order to show that Pelosi's proposal of jail time for those without health insurance should land her in jail as many innocent people could be hurt if her idea would have been implemented. This manipulation has the possibility of being harmful as someone who saw it might think that she was really in jail and that she needs to be removed from her job. According to the article I found, this image would be an example of photojournalism manipulation that is never allowed as you cannot add or move objects from pictures. "Good photo enhancement should be like good copyediting—the goal is to improve the message, not create science fiction." This quote from my article pretty much sums up the point of the whole thing. Photo manipulation can be allowed as long as it isn't done to deceive. My picture would not be considered ethical in any way as it is a blatant attempt to deceive. In order to manipulate a picture ethically, it must be done in such a way that the meaning of the photo is not changed. You can make the photo look nicer, but as in the case of my photo that lies, you cannot create something that doesn't really exist.

Salvo, Suzanna. "True Lies." Communication World 25.5 (2008): 26-30. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Apr. 2010.