*ooof*: The Test of a Closer Look

For a change I thought I should go back to a character shot of Armitage again. Thorin Oakenshield is the man dwarf. Please let me precede the analysis with a big thank you to all the faithful readers who have engaged in discussion so far. I hugely appreciate your input and your feedback – it makes my day when I read your reactions to photos I discuss! But more than that, they provide me with motivation and also with new ideas for further exploration of photographic themes, practice and interpretation. On previous *ooof* posts, for instance, the question of photoshop has come up in our post-posting discussions on a regular basis. Following from that, I have chosen this particular image for today’s *ooof* because it will allow me to talk a bit about post-production and give you a few pointers re. photoshopping of imagery.

First of all let me make this clear again: No image these days leaves a photographer’s hands without post-production. Not a single one. It may come as a surprise to some of you, when I say that images have never been not post-produced. Even in the early 20th century, photographic prints and negatives were manipulated. Strictly speaking, the chemical processing of a print was already a post-produced interpretation of the negative: Contrary to popular belief, photographers *can* manipulate an exposure from a film negative. While exposing the negative onto the photographic paper, they could either “burn” or  “dodge” parts of the image. These terms in photography are used to describe the process of manipulating the exposure of certain areas of a print. The two terms are pretty self-explanatory: Dodging describes the process of avoiding exposure, while burning does the opposite – it increases the exposure on a given part of a print. Without going into details about the actual way of achieving it, I can describe to you the effect of these processes: If you dodge, you make a part of the image lighter, if you burn, you make a part darker. That way you can, for instance, cancel out details of an image, or emphasise parts.

Digital photography, and Photoshop, have made the altering of images much easier and much less time-consuming, of course. It is nowadays part and parcel of a photographer’s job to “clean up” his images. Consequently, what we get served by the media nowadays are – polemically speaking – sanitised versions of the slice of life that photography presents. Photography as a tool of documentation is  dead. You simply cannot trust it anymore. But there are tell-tale signs that post-production leaves on the final version of an image, and I have chosen this composite of Thorin as an easy example.

The Majestic Sword Bearer Himself. Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield in a promo image for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Image sourced via richardarmitagenet.com

That this image has been photoshopped is clear to the most naïve of all viewers because there are various elements in the picture that have been ripped out of their context. The picture, places Thorin in the centre and encircles him with objects, locations and figures. This is done to give context to the man who is at the centre of the quest and the film. We have Thorin prominently showing his magnificent sword (*ahem*, do I hear someone snigger in the background? Well, you are in good company – even Armitage himself couldn’t resist some sword-related innuendo ) Where were we? Ah, yes, Thorin is showing off his sword. He is in the foreground, looking towards the right (from our perspective), his sword is pointing the same way. In movie language, btw, this denotes a view towards the future. (Notice how movement of “positive” characters in movies tends to be shown towards the right, whereas negative characters or danger is characterised by their movement towards the left of the screen…) The background of the image has been composed from two different shots. On the left we have a scene from inside Bilbo Baggins’ house, the initial meeting of the dwarves before they set off on their quest. The right hand side has been made up from a still of the encounter with the trolls. If you look carefully you will notice a dwarf lying in the sack in front of the pot. It is clear that these two components are not part of the same movie scene – one is indoors, the other outdoors (also compare the backgrounds of the backgrounds: the doorway and ceiling on the left and the rock face on the right).

To the “learned” eye there are other indicators that the three composite elements do not stem from the same scene. The clue is in the lighting and the hues. Our main image component, Thorin, is lit from slightly to the left of his front, from slightly above. The light catches the right side of his face, leaving shadows on his right side. The figures in the background on the left, however, have been lit from other directions. The lighting there actually makes no sense at all: Kili appears to have been lit from the right, Bombur dead-pan from the left, and Gloin from above left. There is the shadow of the beer mug which indicates light coming from behind left. Even the leg of the table gets a shadow (ridiculous! Why would there be a source of light *under* the table???) from behind left. None of these lighting set-ups match that of our main focal point, Thorin. And neither does the lighting on the right: The pot is clearly lit from above (observe the shadow under the rim). The dwarf in front of it is lit from the front, lighting up his face and brow, when the light should either shine from above him like on the pot or come from the fire in front of which he lies. Messed up!

A similarly mess is the varying and conflicting hues of the image. Starting in the centre again, Thorin appears to have been shot in daylight. The light is reasonably bright and white. The background left has a yellow hue – meant to denote the warm candlelight – which does not match the light on Thorin. (There is some warmer hue on Thorin’s chest, but for the sake of my argument I choose to ignore that *ggg*.) In case of the background right it is even more messed up in itself, with the pot receiving a daylight hue(white/bright) and the dwarf in front bathed in a yellow hue (fire light).

And what do Photoshop artists do, when they want to cover up their activities? They use smoke and mirrors. Or just smoke, in this case. Parts of the image have been given some artificial smoke wafting from the big troll pot, past Thorin, into Bilbo’s house and in front of the table. A nice attempt at obscuring some of the image areas where the various component pictures join up.

Apart from lighting/hue, another typical give-away for photoshop composites is perspective. It is extremely difficult to match up different images because it is most unlikely that the stills photographer shot each composite image from exactly the same perspective. With Thorin, the perspective is straight-on. This is pretty well-matched with the pot in the background right. However, when you look at the scene in the background left, your stomach should start churning and you should feel a sense of vertigo: The table appears to float up at the back, and logically the mug and plates should be sliding off the front. Because here the photographer has shot from a slightly higher vantage point, emphasising the shortness of the dwarves and the smaller scale of the Hobbit’s dwelling. The tilted camera position for the background left and the straight-on perspective of the camera for the foreground image do not match up.

Chances are, I am picking this apart, and nobody cares. Hey, even *I* don’t really care. My attention is taken up by the majesticity of his Majesty. This is a promo image in the tradition of a movie poster which picks some of the most memorable, pivotal scenes of the film and collates them for an overview over the plot. Maybe, for that purpose, it is actually useful to “feel” that the images do not match up and belong to different scenes in the same film? It is only on closer inspection that these things annoy me. As a photographer, I would have preferred a “real” image, not a makey-uppy one. That’s what we are there for, film people!! Give us jobs and we produce images for you that stand the test of a closer look!

All text © Guylty at me + richard armitage, 2013. Please credit when using excerpts and links. Images and video copyrights accrue to their owners.

~ by Guylty on February 12, 2013.