Image Manipulation

A slight digression, to discuss photographs. Since I started more-or-less-daily blogging a few years ago, I’ve tried to always have at least one image per post. Sometimes they’re old drawings; sometime maps; once in a while it’s an image of an old text. Most of the time, at least one image is a photograph. And, to put it simply, photographs can lie. I’m not going to go into great detail on this topic, because I think it’s well known that photos can be manipulated in various ways that change the relationship of objects to one another (telephoto lenses compressing distance, for example) and change the appearance of objects.

The photo above is a good example of very simple manipulation: someone has turned up the contrast to make the building lights more prominent. Go to the building with the H&M sign at its top and a big blue antenna, and then look down and to the left. The old Paramount Building – the stepped pyramid with a globe on its roof – is not actually radioactive, but you might think otherwise from this view. The blurriness of the H&M sign, among others, is a good tip-off that the contrast has been pushed up.

It certainly makes for a dramatic photo, though. Fifth Avenue is on the right and the Paramount Building faces Times Square, and Midtown rarely looks so good. To give a counter example, here’s a similar kind of view, looking a few blocks to the south (you can still see the H&M sign and the top of the Paramount) for comparison:

There’s no obvious manipulation here: the skyline is just as jagged, but it doesn’t look like the cover of a noir mystery.

I bring this up because we regularly use photos in reports and drawings to illustrate conditions in buildings. We manipulate photos to make them more readable (including pushing up the contrast) and we annotate them. We do so with the intent of improving communication, but this leaves us open to accusations that we are modifying photos to mislead.