my picture that tells a white lie and a bunch of analysis. Let's have a look :D

If you ever had the same concern with me about ethical issues in image manipulation, I bet that you should read this entry. Some think that it's unethical to alter any images and deceive your audience whatsoever. From the view of these people, pictures are pure realities without any prejudice or preference. However, it turns out that every image ever captured is in some way a distortion of reality (Salvo). The way in which the photographers crop their views even before pushing the buttons or putting the images into the computers already distorted the pure truth. The truth can be a whole thing, but what if a photographer only pointed the len on a proportion of the whole?

As a result, it is not image population through either Adobe Photoshop, Picasa or Picnik that deceives the audience in a negative way. Image population, in a positive side, can really change people's minds and question their obsolete assumptions. That's what so many social issue advertising campaign did, and that is also what I tried to do with my own.

What I chose to manipulate is a picture of beer pouring, and the picture was somehow simple with half a bottle and a full mug of beer. I made several changes to the picture and thus raised awareness of people about drinking. The photo originally was found on istockphoto.com and I just pasted the link here for anyone who wants to know how my editing makes the picture look so much more weird and worse than it was, haha, just kidding lol. http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-2668578-beer-pouring-in-to-mug.php. At first, I came up with the idea of using the beaker, which helps me illustrate the slogan "measure your drink". However, I failed to find any beaker with beer (why didnot lab teacher/chemist do that??It looks fun, haha) and integrate the beer part (in beer mug) with the empty beaker. I technically can do this if I changed the opacity of the beer part, so the beer part looks like be inside the beaker. However, other problem arose as the beer part cannot fit exactly within the area inside the beaker (beaker and beer mug have different sizes and different shapes though). Because of all these above problems, I ended up putting a ruler besides the mug though you donot often measure liquid with ruler lol. Noticing that there was a siginificant difference between the color of the ruler and the rest of the picture, I changed the hue/saturation so they can well fit with each other. And the last thing I did, to ensure everyone get my really really sophisicated and awkward idea, is to put the slogan in the middle.
I have no hope that it will change something in a wide scale, no way no way :(. But I really wish that everyone ever visiting my blog should tell themselves the message "measure your drinK".

Work cited:Salvo, Suzanne. "True lies." Communication World 25.5 (2008): 26-30. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.