One of my favorite photographs of a
catastrophe of all time is this photograph of the Deepwater Horizon
blowing up in April of 2010.
Boom !
It is part of a series of photographs
taken by an individual on a nearby boat, one of the boats which
picked up survivors from this clusterfuck of environmental
destruction caused by the shallow greed and criminal stupidity of
large corporations.
Few photographs are of this quality and
drama. It has spectacle, it has detail, it has scope, it has exotic
technology. It elicits a sense of awe and wonder at the magnitude of
the disaster caught in an instant by the photographer. It ranks with
the great images of its type, such as that of the Hindenberg
disaster.
When I first saw it, it looked fake to
me.
In fact, it looked so fake, I wondered
why the usual suspects did not discuss in public the obvious
implications that the event was planned by the CIA / Illuminati / Rothschild organization in
order to raise oil prices, declare martial law, and put everyone in a
concentration camp underground before Jesus returned and we left with the space aliens.
Here is why the image looks like a
visual effect from a movie:
1. The perfect and dramatic point of
view and timing
Rarely do we get to see a disaster from
a perfect point of view at the moment of disaster. Generally when
such things happen and there is a photographic record of it, the
disaster itself is a distance away, or the timing is not quite right,
or the photograph suffers from technical flaws due to the unexpected
nature of the event. It might be shot through a window, or have
someone in the frame that obscures part of what is going on, or there
is significant camera shake. A beautiful example of this was the Russian "dash cam" view of the meteor through the window of
the automobile.
2. The exquisite detail in part of the
photograph
For reasons that probably have to do
with the unusual lighting, combined with post processing in
photoshop, we have here amazing detail of a large civil engineering
artifact. Just look at the detail on the side of this
contraption... its completely fabulous. I suspect that some variable
contrast enhancement and unsharp masking has been applied. It has
that look to it. I also happens to look like a painting on glass, as
I discuss in the next item. The actual photograph was taken, I
suspect, with a tripod and/or with an image stabilization lens. There is
no camera shake worth noting.
3. The composition of the photograph
appears to be layered.
Visual effects is generally a
photomontage of different elements. Those elements might be
photography on a stage, model photography, 2D painted elements and 3D
synthetic elements. In the history of visual effects some of the
most interesting matte paintings consisted of what was called
"paintings on glass" where a painting had transparent areas
where live action could be composited.
The probable layers front to back are:
foreground water, with glint animation, painting of the Horizon
leaning at an angle, first smoke layer, fire layer, second smoke
layer, background sky layer, for a total of six layers.
4. The appearance of serious image
processing.
Lots and lots of sharpening and
probable variable contrast and lots and lots of screwing with the
color curves has gone on here.
So whats the moral of this story ? Seeing is not believing, and photography is easier than ever to fake, but sometimes even things that look fake
may not be.
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Footnote:
For those who care about what actually
happened here, not the photograph but the disaster, the best article
I have found was in the NY TImes
Magazine and can be read here:
The story makes the point that most
people assume that once the blowout happened that the destruction of
the Horizon was inevitable. The article explains what happened and
why it was not inevitable that the Horizon would have been destroyed. The Horizon, it turns out, was filled with all sorts of mechanisms that would have allowed it (in all probability) to have survived the blowout without destruction or loss of life. (In other words, the blowout underwater would still have happened, and with it the oil leak, but the Horizon would not have exploded as a result of it).
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