I think I have fessed up to my fangirl level of love for the show Deadliest Catch on this blog before, but in case you missed it: I am a total DC addict! A lot of the promotional imagery for the show is composite – the reasoning behind this would be that there are so many different people and elements to consider (captains, crew members, boats, weather, machinery, crab, etc.) that it would be difficult to properly represent the show with just one main image.

Abducted by Design has done a breakdown of all the photos and imagery that went into making the promotional images for Season 5 called Case Study “Deadliest Catch” – which shows the process step-by-step. Although I wish there were captions to go along with the photos that explain the process, just seeing the steps visually is very interesting. The work was done by Master Designer Peter Jaworowski.

It appears that a vandal is running amok in Berlin slapping stickers on subway posters that feature heavily airbrushed photos of Britney Spears, Leona Lewis and Christina Aguilera. The stickers make the subway posters resemble the user interface of Photoshop. Brilliant! You can see more photos of the vandal’s work on Flickr and Gizmodo. [via Feministe, Jezebel]

Above: “The Bloodthirsty Warmonger” – a Photoshop creation by photographer Jill Greenberg. She created this image to “stir stuff up”, but once the media started to stir Greenberg’s stuff up, she removed it (and others like it) from her website.

Here at TLS the month of October shall be dubbed “Shoptober”, and with the exception of any timely “in the news” types of Shops, TLS will be mainly devoted to the paranormal, the downright spooky and the creatures that go bump in the night! So get ready for the debunking of some ghosts and goblins – the world is not really as scary as it seems! (Except for your 401(k) statements. Those really are as scary as they seem.)

Since election day is drawing near here in the US, I thought I’d kick Shoptober off with THE McCAIN MONSTER (above)! Photographer Jill Greenberg was hired to photograph Presidential Candidate John McCain for the October cover of The Atlantic. Maybe it was the spirit the month, or the fact that Greenberg is a self-proclaimed “hard-core Democrat”, but the Master Photo Retoucher didn’t “touch up” the cover photo hardly at all.

“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she told photography blog PDNPulse.

OK, I can respect that. You were “keeping it real”. The blog goes on to report…

After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

The Atlantic didn’t select the diabolical looking McCain for its cover. Greenberg is hoping to license that image to some other magazine (she negotiated a two-week embargo with The Atlantic so she could re-license images from the shoot before the election).

Warned that the image is just the kind of thing that will stir up the anti-media vitriol in the conservative blogosphere, Greenberg said, “Good. I want to stir stuff up, but not to the point where I get audited if he becomes president.”

That said, she goes on to explain that she’s thought about replacing McCain’s mouth with bloody shark teeth and displaying the image on a billboard with the message that the candidate is a bloodthirsty war monger.

Given her strong feelings about John McCain, we asked whether she had any reservations about taking the assignment in the first place.

“I didn’t,” she says. “It’s definitely exciting to shoot someone who is in the limelight like that. I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.”

I enjoy political art, but the story behind these images just seems so intentionally nasty it leaves a bad taste in my eyes. Greenberg scored a photo shoot with McCain under the premise that he was posing for a cover photo for The Atlantic, and she lead the folks at The Atlantic to believe she was professional enough to actually do the job she was hired to do. What she did was unethical and extremely unprofessional.

I might be more inclined to support Greenberg’s artistic expressions if she hadn’t pussed out and removed the images from her site when the media started buzzing about her altered photos – although still unethical, I could at least admire her balls. [If you want to see the rest of the images that have been removed from her site you can find them at American Digest.] If you are going to risk your professional cred just to make a political statement with your art, then stand behind that statement.

In other words: Get audited or go home.

Related articles…

Editor’s Note [The Atlantic]

How Jill Greenberg Really Feels About John McCain [PDNPulse]

Fallout From Jill Greenberg’s McCain Images [PDNPulse]

Photoshop and Political Cheap Shots: Photog Doctors McCain Pics to “Stir Things Up” [PC World]

Canadian photographer Jill Greenberg in trouble with The Atlantic over manipulated photos of John McCain [National Post]

A rendering Teresa made on request for her cousin who asked for a medieval theme. “On the computer she’s like everyone else,” said her mom Becky of how the computer is her outlet and common denominator.
[Image © Teresa Chestnut/Redding Record]

Every now and then I run across someone so inspiring it makes me appreciate my life, and everyone in it, even more. I am totally addicted to a tv show called Deadliest Catch, and through my discussions with other DC fans came across the story of a fan named Teresa. Although what she creates has nothing to do with deliberate fakery, I thought her story – and how she uses Photoshoop to express her creativity - was interesting, compelling, and worthy of posting about here. Earlier this month, an article was published on her in the Redding Record…

Teresa Chesnut, a quadriplegic, creates pieces of art on Internet
Betty Lease, Contributing writer

Teresa Chesnut and her mom Becky sit in front of one of her favorite renderings which she created. Teresa uses a device that allows her to work on the computer and create artistic renderings through head movements and puffs of air. “If she wasn’t here to help me and be my side I wouldn’t be able to do what I do,” Teresa said of the close relationship she shares with her mom. Teresa was 18 when she was injured by a drunk driver.

Becky Chesnut leans in to watch her daughter’s lips as the young woman carefully mouths the words she wants to say. No sound comes from Teresa’s mouth because her vocal cords are paralyzed, along with the rest of her body except her neck and head.

Teresa is so good at enunciating that she makes herself understood most of the time. When her mom is stumped on a word, they quickly switch to an alphabet routine, with Teresa blinking when Becky says the right letter out loud. They continue until she knows what word Teresa is saying.

The two Redding residents have fine-tuned their communication, something that became necessary after Teresa was in a car crash, the victim of a drunken driver, and became paralyzed from the neck down at age 18.

Now 32, Teresa — who goes by Reesa online — has learned to create graphic art online with Photoshop, snipping images she likes from free sites and pasting them onto her own creation. It’s a painstaking process for Teresa, who slowly and meticulously outlines each image with a head mouse that is directed by a tube she holds in her mouth.

[read the rest of the article]

Here is a video that shows some examples of extreme photo retouching, and shows you just how far you can take an image in Photoshop…