For my Photoshop class last week I tried to bring home to my 6th graders the importance of scrutinizing the media they consume – whether it is a billboard, a news photo in a newspaper, an album cover, celebrity photos, a food label etc.
This is the exercise: Could you put a teacher’s face on the cover of TIME? This recent cover is of one of the twin astronauts, Scott Kelly, (whose brother, Mark is married to former Arizona congresswoman, Gabby Giffords) will be part of a one-year NASA study which I am following.
The local connection and space angle makes it a fascinating topic that will stay relevant until this time next year. The teacher in question is very supportive of this.
This week too, the 6th graders continue to work on their covers. For more details, and to track their progress, check in here…
Hoipolloireport 
Very ironic you chose Mark Kelly’s brother for something related not just to photoshop (and I’m using that term as a generic reference to ANY software, app, etc related to the manipulation of both still photos as well as video footage, not just the actual Photoshop software that I believe is made by Adobe, as has become common practice now for most people as far as I know of, at least anecdotally) I say this because I haven’t had much interest in the past in the apparently now BOOMING “conspiracy theory” genre, or even some will argue industry, but after moving into a new home and waiting a week or so for my cable tv/internet service to be installed and already being no fan of most tv shows today and then seeing just how awful having just local tv is, I began making constant use of my formerly occasionally used cellphone hotspot. (even had to bump up my data limit temporarily!) Sop, for that week I became youtube’s #1 user and wow, there is a LOT of conspiracy related stuff there. I always did have major issues with the JFK case, but that was it.
Basically, nearly EVERY big story has at least some theorists and many are quite dubious, yet some really raised some real questions for me and trying to sift through the possibly true, the probably wrong even if there are a much larger number of coincidences than you’d expect and then you have the questions of the validity of these “amazing coincidences”. I could go on and on, but I’ll tie it together here-one area I found that raised some MAJOR questions and didn’t require too much work to validate what they claimed and that is when you are shown pictures circulated via the mass media, which if you have at least cursory knowledge of how photoshop works and the telltale signs which are very hard to avoid, wow a few of these cases that have the conspiracy world abuzz ALSO include some pictures many of us have seen just watching the news that sure as heck look like they’ve been HEAVILY photoshopped.
The two cases most glaringly odd to me regarding the photoshop angle are Sandy Hook (the now famous “crazy lookin dude” pic of the shooter (or alleged shooter) Adam Lanza has “THIS PICTURE HAS BEEN HEAVILY RUN THROUGH PHOTOSHOP AND NOT VERY WELL DONE!” Listening to more info on that case, while my default setting is to think faking such an event is simply beyond any rational thinking and well into the Twilight Zone, there were so many major questions, even problems in just the few hours I spent on that case.
Same thing for the Gabby Giffords case, which of course goes back a ways now and which I’d NEVER thought twice about being faked for any reason and still doubt would be, BUT WHAT IS UP WITH THESE OBVIOUSLY PHOTOSHOPPED pictures (in Giffords case, these are all after the shooting, which if true was done to show injuries that either are being exaggerated for some reason, or never occurred in the first place!) A year ago of you’d have brought the topic up, I’d have said JFK seems fishy as well as MLK (his own family apparently says so too) and RFK is fishy, but come on how do you fake a grade school massacre? That part I still have major issues on, HOW you’d think it can be pulled off, but as far as motive there is little doubt there as all of these cases have been followed up and often followed so quickly it seems to be far too much to coordinate in just a few days or even within 24 hours and they literally have a traveling stage show already up and running at full speed-how in the world is that possible without knowing ahead of time!
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