For my project, I needed a picture of Hubert Lanzinger's The Flag Bearer, which was easy to find, a pic of Karl Rove, which was even easier, and a picture of the White House press room, which surprisingly proved to be a bit more difficult.
There are some out there, but not as many as I would expect, what with it being a press room and all. I finally settled on the pic below mainly because it included an easel, so I wouldn't have to hunt up a suitable easel as well.
I found this on the NOAA website, attached to an August 11, 1999 story about new initiatives for drought and heat forecasts.
Pretty dry stuff, if you'll pardon the pun. As I got going on the project, though, in particular one of the key parts (perspective on the poster, getting it lined up behind the lectern), I discovered something not so much surprising as intensely annoying:
This photograph has already been doctored.
Now as I mentioned, I'd picked through several press room photos, and I looked again when I ran into this snag and confirmed that, no, nobody actually took a chunk out of the corner of the presidential lectern with a whittling knife.
I went back to the site and took another look at what I was dealing with. NOAA's web daemon informed me that the picture and its thumbnail were last modified 02-Jan-2002 16:38:39 -0600, and that the page that links to them was last modified a minute and 35 seconds later. On an April 1999 article? Whatever. Like I can believe anything a part of the executive branch tells me anyway. Nevertheless, given the shoddy job on the picture itself, I can easily see them forgetting to fix their timestamps.
This is one of the hallmarks of the current executive, not only to lie about everything, even things that most people don't even care about, but to do a monumentally crappy job doing it.
Now, I've spent a lot of time bitching about the excesses, ineptitudes and corruption of the current executive, and I'm kind of tired of it; if you don't know these people are full of crap by now, you probably never will. So I'm not going to do that here.
What I'm going to do, instead, is gripe about that little bastard who did the actual work. I don't know if this person is male or female, but for the sake of brevity I shall refer to this person throughout the remainder of this page as "Mr. Tool."
Yes you, Mr. Tool, having made what should have been a fairly straightforward Photoshop project a days-long, aggravating struggle for me, are the subject of today's diatribe. This is some of the most slipshod crap I've seen in a long time. You should be ashamed of yourself—here you are with a job in our glorious leader's government (which is about the only place anybody can find a job these days) and you can't do any better than this? People in your position in Maoist China did a much better job with nothing but old-fashioned airbrushes and a gun to their head. The only excuse I can think of is that you were on a five-minute deadline, but the immense ineptitude rendered in this image strongly indicates you spent a great deal of time fucking it up.
So the photographer was pretty good; he or she probably had one of those fancy tripods with a leveling bubble, and is therefore lined up straight on with the podium. It's too bad they can't sue Mr. Tool for the butchery of their hard work.
What is immediately evident from this vantage point is that Mr. Tool apparently rotated the left edge of the lectern clockwise. Why? Are you paid by the hour? Don't you know that, while still not perfect, a simple in situ cut and paste would have yielded much better results? Or do you just not care?
Not only was the left edge rotated clockwise, the top edge (along the shadow in the groove) was rotated counterclockwise, perhaps in a muddled attempt to fix what had previously been screwed. The lines of perspective were thereby thrown completely out of whack, and I had to go in and fix that as well, along with the gaping hole left by Mr. Tool's version of the groove, right in front of the chart—way, way too big, and right in the spot that will make it most obvious that this image has been dinked with. (Or rather, what would have been the most obvious spot if the rest of your piddlings hadn't been so egregious.)
And while you're at it, Mr. Tool (and I hope you're reading this), as long as you're in Photoshop anyway, do you think maybe next time you could bump the color balance a little more toward blue? The walls don't look quite so dingy that way, and after all it's not like you're a bit concerned about accuracy.
Oh right, you probably don't know how to select the face to balance it out. Never mind.
At any rate, here's my finished project, which I admit isn't perfect. (For one thing the shadows on Rove's face are a bit off, but I didn't want another picture because his expression in this one is just too perfect.) I think, however, that as a rank amateur I pretty much embarrassed the tax-paid "professional" here.
Distribute freely and widely, I put all the pictures on that page in the public domain. Give them to your neocon friends, especially the two-page magazine ad concept piece; my guess is that they'll love them. "He sure does look good in that suit-a armor, don't he?"
What was on the original chart, you ask? I guess we'll never know; maybe we could ask Bill Daley. Or maybe Mr. Tool kept a copy of the original.
Nah. He ain't that smart.