A stubbornness in the face of fact that is unbecoming of an academic.

(Before I get started, I want to acknowledge that I know Ann Althouse is an attention fiend, and as such revels in any that comes her way. Furthermore, I know that giving her the attention she craves will only embolden her to spout even more outrageous nonsense in the future. However, the white-hotness of her intellectual dishonesty here compels me to consider it a vacuity of historical import. Future scholars will read this post and realize that this was the moment crypto-conservatives discovered the fact that no matter how shallow their waters were, Zeno and his paradox prevented them from ever being emptied altogether.)

It may not be breaking new that the President copped a glance at a young Mayara Rodrigues Tavare last week:

But I want to call your attention to Ann Althouse’s “close-reading” of the photograph:

Obama’s arms hang free, emphasizing the tilt, and either gravity or will causes the left arm to hang inches away from the torso. See how much lower the right hand is than the left? His neck is craned out and around so that the line of sight is directly at the ass. His mouth is open as if to say: That’s what I want.

When presented with video evidence to the contrary, she curtly replied:

I have seen the video, and I stand by my analysis of the still photograph.

She watched video evidence that refutes her analysis and stands by it anyway. But I believe she can be forgiven for insisting, essentially, that photograph is what it is, because she knows nothing about photography. A competent photographer would know, for example, what forced perspective is, and that the effect sometimes occurs accidentally, such that a child innocently swatting an insect might appear to be brutalizing a baby (Exhibit 1). This occurs because both subjects are within the depth of field:

The Batman who is too close the camera is as blurry as the one too far away. Only the Batman within the depth of field is in focus. Accidental forced perspective happens because auto-focusing cameras increase the depth of field and flatten the picture. Objects both near and far remain in focus, such that when you innocently shoot this:

You end up with this. Modern cameras flatten images by making it appear as if everything within the depth of field is the same distance from the photographer. The effect can be exaggerated by having one object both further away and occupying higher ground (Exhibit 2, Exhibit 3, Exhibit 4, Exhibit 5), but the general principle remains: so long as both objects are in focus, they will appear to be the same distance from the photographer.

The video of Obama clearly shows that not only is he moving toward the camera as Ms. Tavare walks away from it, he is also moving from a higher position to a lower one relative to the photographer. In short, anyone with any knowledge of photography would know that Obama looks to a right that is three feet in front of Ms. Tavare, but that because of a perfect storm of aperture and architecture, the flattened image gives the impression that he is scoping out the underage Brazilian.

Only it doesn’t even do that.

A competent judge of images would notice that Obama is not entirely in focus, meaning that he is only entering the depth of field; whereas Ms. Tavare is crisply focused, meaning that she is currently within the depth of field. That bears repeating: she is within the depth of field that Obama is just entering, and must therefore be closer to the photographer than he is.

Given that Obama cannot be both closer to and further away from the photographer than Ms. Tavare, anyone with any photographic expertise would recognize that Obama can’t possibly be, as Althouse in her ignorance observes, “caught [in a] moment of as-yet-unconstrained pursuit,” because he can’t see her behind when he’s in front of her.

If Althouse knew anything about photography, she would know this. But because she doesn’t, we can forgive her for—what’s that you say? She considers herself something an expert on the subject? Quit pulling my leg. No one who regularly shoots anything could not notice that Obama’s only just coming into focus—she posts photographs to her blog daily? Really? You mean to tell me that someone who knows about photography and has seen the video insists that Obama shot Ms. Vasare a lascivious glance?

Maybe we still ought to forgive her anyway, because it’s difficult to tell from low-resolution versions of that photograph like the one she posted that the high-resolution version on which it’s based has been digitally manipulated to make Obama look sharper. What do I mean? Sharpening tools increase the contrast between adjacent pixels. Say I take a picture of a President with a blurry hand:

I can sharpen that hand so it looks less blurry:

But because that hand was so blurry, I couldn't sharpen it without creating digital artifacts. The area I sharpened is a clearly-defined box in which the altered pixels are more distinct from their neighbors than those elsewhere in the picture are from theirs. Even the seemingly uniform blue background bears evidence of my sharpening. 

Increasing the contrast between adjacent pixels also makes it appear as if there are more pixels in one area of the photograph than another.  So when you encounter an image in which there appear to be more pixels in one clearly-demarcated area than another, you know that you are looking at an image that has been digitally sharpened. For example, compare the black hem and pantyhose adjacent to the hand in this random photograph:

See the box? Now compare the neckline of this black shirt to the shirt itself in the same photograph:

Now try and find the the contours of the sharpening box in this:

That was a trick question, as there are a couple of them in there. Here’s one:

Now, do I think these were deliberately nefarious edits—that is, do I believe Reuter’s Jason Reed circulated a photograph of Obama that was touched-up so that it appeared as if the President were sinning in his heart?

No.

Digital photographs are sharpened all the time because of the limitations of digital cameras. Reed likely saw that photograph, assumed he caught Obama peeking and sharpened the President’s hand and face because that’s what you do with hands and faces.

In this case, however, his minor alterations amount to editorial decisions, because the digital artifacts that are so obvious in the high-resolution photograph disappear in the conversion to web-friendlier lower resolutions. Reed’s de rigueur sharpening demonstrably changed the meaning of the moment he photographed, in effect creating an incident that never happened.

So perhaps we should be forgiving of Althouse despite her faux-expert and incompetent analysis, because in the photograph she “analyzed” it is more difficult—though by no means impossible—to see evidence of that digital manipulation. And I would be, were it not for the fact that once she viewed the video, she knew that Obama was not in a “stance.” According to any dictionary you care to consult—I’ll go with the OED—a “stance” is a “a standing-place, station, position,” from the Italian “stanza,” meaning “stopping place.”

Had she one whit of intellectual honesty, she would have viewed that video and changed her post to indicate that Obama was not in a “stance,” because just as one cannot be simultaneously in front of and behind something, one cannot be walking and stopped at the same time. If I am walking, I am not standing; if I am standing, I am not walking. Her analysis of his “stance” is a not an interpretative error: it is a material one. Her insistence that her analysis is sound despite this error and evidence to the contrary constitutes a stubbornness in the face of fact that is unbecoming of an academic.

If you take a picture of the moon and claim that the resulting photograph is proof that the moon’s a stationary object and then someone shows you a video of it moving across the night sky, you cannot claim that your interpretation of the event depicted in the photograph is still valid. What you are effectively claiming is that the photograph is a photograph, i.e. that it is a still image captured from a moving tableau. This is not a matter of interpretation, but a description of the medium; to claim otherwise is to deny the very reality to which the photograph pertains . . .

. . .which is precisely what Althouse is doing. Her analysis of a manipulated photograph trumps reality, and she can’t be bothered to articulate why exactly that is. But that won’t stop her (or the hoard of equally incompetent illiterates who base their opinion on her photographic “expertise”) from claiming that her “interpretation” is still valid. They’ll be doing that until the moon stops dead in the sky and falls to the stage they’ve mistaken for the world. I only hope the rest of us abandoned that theater long ago (but remain primed for the inevitable disappointment).

Update.  Ahistoricality asks two sharp questions: first, why a professional photographer would enhance his photograph with the rectangular marquee tool (thereby creating boxes) instead of something like the magic wand. The answer is that he didn't have to---he could have used the more sophisticated tool---but that the evidence shows that he did.  I suspect this has something to do with how fast he wanted the photograph distributed, as well as the fact that he knew it would be reproduced at lower resolutions, thereby mitigating the visibility of his manipulation.  His second question is whether the apparent boxes are a normal effect of compression.  They could be; however, normal compression results in a more evenly distributed pixelation effect, but as you can tell from that link, the box of more highly contrasted pixels is still visible beneath his cuff. 

(x-posted.)

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

I'm a little confused: I'm a rank amateur with photoshop, but even I can avoid doing my enhancement in squares. (I sent you an enhancement of our previous president's hand without the facial distortion). Are you telling me that professionals routinely enhance chunks pictures without actually bothering to select the specific area?

Damn, I'm in the wrong line of work.

[SEK]

As I said in my reply: yes, it's not only possible, it happens all the time---in part because getting the photo out there quickly is important. So it doesn't have to be a box, it's just obvious that, in this case, it was.

[Ahistoricality]

I have a second question about "enhancement effects." I'm used to working with my own pictures, much higher resolution than the video-grab in this case. So I resized one down to roughly equivalent density, and I'm seeing what look like these pixelation effects on faces and other features without ever doing any enhancement. It's a feature of the attempt to depict a complex image at too-low resolution, whereas clothing and other solid color things look relatively smooth and unretouched.

Don't get me wrong, I've viewed the video and the still is, indeed, a deceptive moment. I agree, but I'm having a little trouble replicating the technical aspects of your presentation.

[medieval woman]

Scott, this post was great...

[SEK]

Thanks, M.W.

Ahistoricality, when you resize the entire high-resolution image, the pixelization is more evenly distributed. Here's a shot of the high-resolution (500 pixel-wide) image reduced to the lower-resolution (343 pixel-wide) image Althouse linked to:

As you can see, the evidence of the fast-and-dirty sharpening is still there, although it's a bit mitigated by the other pixelation that occurred during the change in format. It's still more pronounced in the square area beneath his cuff than anywhere else in the image.

(FTR: I did the resize myself in Photoshop, then in Fireworks, then in IrfanView, and the more even distribution is there in each. I suspect the agency that compressed the low-resolution shot Althouse posted has a bit of a better algorithm than me, as evidence by my "though by no and "means impossible" shots up there.)

[Ahistoricality]

As I said at the other place, Thanks, Scott: apparently I’m just not used to the fast-paced, corner-cutting world of journalistic image-making. I’ve been working too hard.

Her analysis of a manipulated photograph trumps reality, and she can’t be bothered to articulate why exactly that is.

If I thought she was being this sophisticated, I might suggest she was engaged in some Barthesian postmodern project in which the free signifier photograph could not only hold meaning in itself though her independent reading but also reveal truth about the signified which hold even when the signifier-in-context cannot be read in such an independent way.

If I were a real postmodernist, I’d probably argue that the concept of signifier-in-context is itself meaningless: there are only signifiers and the truths we construct from them which are valuable even when they are meaningless to any other reader. This is why I’m not a postmodernist.

I don’t think Althouse is, either (at least not that she’d admit). But it almost fits.

[Karl Steel]

Well, as a real postmodernist you'd argue that there's no distinguishing signifier from context. This means, in part, that there are no private meanings, like the one you hypothetically propose and then dismiss.

Great post SEK. It's spelled whit by the way.

[Ahistoricality]

Karl, you're partially right. A good postmodernist might go that route, but a pretty damned large portion of the self-identified postmodern community would say that there are nothing but private meanings, and that the context of the signifier is not fixed by its media.....

Yeah, I'm being a little unfair, but I've seen down the blind alleys and black holes this theory leads people into.

[Karl Steel]

but a pretty damned large portion of the self-identified postmodern community would say that there are nothing but private meanings

I honestly feel kind of embarrassed for them.

[Peter Erwin]

... the general principle remains: so long as both objects are in focus, they will appear to be the same distance from the photographer.

No, not really. Keeping both objects in focus is a prerequisite for forced-perspective effects (because if they're not both in focus, the effect will never work), but that's all it is. As the Wikipedia article you linked to explains, there's a whole lot more to forced perspective than focus. The vast majority of photographs with large depth of field do not result in forced perspective, because there are plenty of clues that let our brains work out the relative sizes and distances. (Look at an Ansel Adams landscape photo -- are you really ever confused into thinking that a tree or boulder in the foreground and a mountain in the background are at the same distance?)

Accidental forced perspective happens because auto-focusing cameras increase the depth of field and flatten the picture.

A. Auto-focusing has nothing to do with any of this;
B. "Flattening the picture" sounds like a reference to perspective distortion, which depends on the focal length of the lens and is completely separate from depth-of-field.

In fact, perspective distortion is probably more relevant here than depth of field: I'd guess that the photo was taken with a strong telephoto lens, and so relative distances appear compressed. This makes it appear that Obama, Sarkozy, and Tavare are all at roughly the same distance from the camera, even if in reality their distances might vary by several feet.

A competent judge of images would notice that Obama is not entirely in focus, meaning that he is only entering the depth of field; whereas Ms. Tavare is crisply focused, meaning that she is currently within the depth of field. That bears repeating: she is within the depth of field that Obama is just entering, and must therefore be closer to the photographer than he is.

Actually, a competent judge of images would notice that there appear to be stairs, that all three figures have at least one foot on the bottom level, that Tavare appears to be stepping up from the bottom level and is thus moving away from the photographer, and that Obama is in the process of stepping forward and is thus moving toward to the photographer. Thus, Obama is in all probability somewhat closer to the photographer than Tavare, although his right foot and her left foot might be at the same distance. If Obama is in fact slightly out of focus, then it's because he's moving out of the in-focus zone.

The problem is that it's hard to judge the relative distances of Obama and Tavare from the photograph. It looks as though his right foot and her left foot might be at the same distance from the step, in which case it might be physically possible for him, at that moment, to be looking at her behind, given how his head is turned and the fact that you can't see his eyes and thus can't tell the exact direction of his gaze.

(Of course, anyone who looks at the video and then still thinks like Althouse does is clearly being an idiot.)

[SEK]

Keeping both objects in focus is a prerequisite for forced-perspective effects . . . perspective distortion is probably more relevant here than depth of field

Those are good points. I spent a good deal of time talking to photographers/graphic designers about how to best explain this, and they argued about the accidental forced perspective vs. perspective distortion, but I went with the former because they convinced me that I can't know what sort of lens the photographer used. You're right, though, that some of the distortion language crept in, but I meant "flattened" in a non-technical way.

would notice that there appear to be stairs

Actually, they were two widely tiered steps that led to a round stage. The curvature of the stage factors into the distortion, but I couldn't find a way to describe that directly without seeming to say this:

If Obama is in fact slightly out of focus, then it's because he's moving out of the in-focus zone.

The video clearly places Obama farther from the camera than her, and this is where the curve of the stage factors in: she's stepping onto the tier he's stepping off of, but it's wide and curving away from the viewer. I think that's the conclusion I came to. Honestly, I'm all up for being corrected, because I'm finding this stuff fascinating: the subject matter's secondary, just like it was when I was learning the dynamics of cinematography earlier in the year: yes, I kept writing about Batman films, but that's because that's what I was teaching. My main interest, at a point, was technical/mechanical.

[harry]

Pardon my bad english. Comparing the movements of Obama, Mayara and the woman Obama is helping down the step I come to the conclusion that the moment of the photograph happens at 0:28 sec. Then the second woman has to avoid Mayara as she is stepping down. If Obama really were 3 feet in front of Mayara that wouldn't happen.

Maybe Obama is blurry because of motion blur. He stepped down a ridiculously steep step.

[Fritz]

A few points that don't have anything to do with the substance of the post, merely its presentation.

First, "giving her attention"? Listen, a partisan hack is as a partisan hack does: if you took all the regular readers of this blog, and multiplied them by the regular readers of the blog I sometimes write at, you would probably still fall short of the rounding error at Althouse's blog.

Second, what the heck is a crypto-conservative? Are we channeling Gore Vidal now?

In any case, some blasts from the past:

Bush's Mystery Bulge

[SEK]

what the heck is a crypto-conservative?

That's someone, like Althouse, who claims to be a liberal despite having voted Republican for decades and supported the Bush administration every last step of the way.

if you took all the regular readers of this blog, and multiplied them by the regular readers of the blog I sometimes write at, you would probably still fall short of the rounding error at Althouse's blog.

Absolutely. But as I said over at that other place:

I’ve taken to pre-emptive meme stamping. I figure if I can marginalize these idiocies before they have the chance to “blossom” into the mainstream a la Lewinsky and the Foster murder, we might could avoid a repeat of the ’90s.

Granted, I know that I’m a small voice, but I tell myself that maybe my words will trickle up into Google such that a conservative speech-writer who searches for “Jack Cashill” will see that he’s been discredited and be forced to advance in a different direction.

I'm trying to do my part to make political discussion a little more substantial, and if I have to tamp down stupidity to do so, well then, that's what I'll do.

[David C. Brewster]

I have another example of an accidental forced perspective that I took about a month before Obama's "ogling" picture.
This one depicts Bert and Ernie apparently checking out a young lady, much the same way Obama is checking out the young lady.
www.flickr.com/photos/42873250@N00/3814620302/