Pictures that Lie

I chose to manipulate an image of our beloved Tower.  As something so familiar to all of us, I find it fun to manipulate it to follow a story that is equally as familiar: King Kong.  I honestly just thought it would be a funny and entertaining idea so I went with it.  My good friend Lyndsey Johnson took this photo and I cropped it to just show the tower.  King Kong and the planes originated from a still photo from the original King Kong film.  I placed King Kong so that he was hanging from the top and I oriented the planes to surround him as is true to the original King Kong still photo (but instead the scene is now set at Trinity rather than on the Empire State Building in NYC).  Since King Kong was in black and white, I changed the Trinity photo to black and white.  I also blurred the Trinity photo and adjusted the color hue and the saturation of all layers.  This was the tricky part since both photos are of very different resolutions - I tried to match them as best as I could.  I don't find this manipulation to be harmful.  It should be taken as comical.  The manipulation is very obvious and the idea of the scene is also quite unrealistic.  This manipulation is for entertainment purposes only.
          I read an article which discussed the ethics of photo manipulaton.  The author argued that the manipulation does not always have to occur using photoshop, we manipulate a scene purely by chosing a certain snap shot.  Also, in the end of the article she proposed rules for what and when certain manipulations are ok.  I found this article to be very relevant to all of us.  Photoshop is not harmful, it is the individual use that can be harmful.  Each individual photographer, editer is responsible for what they do.

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