Humbug! Hoaxes in Literature and Culture.

To create this I used Adobe photoshop. This idea of having a demonic child behind the curtain sprung from an irrational fear that someone is going to pop up behind me when I look at a mirror. The child in the back is actually an old baby photo that I put a radial blur on and changed the opacity, saturation, brightness etc to create a half translucent demon. The hardest part was probably deciding what to put behind the curtain.

A librarian who wishes to remain unnamed snapped this photo of the reading room on a hidden camera. Rumor has it that Harry Potter’s ghost roams the reading room in our very own library when nobody’s around. The evidence doesn’t lie.

Just kidding… This photo was created by taking some photos from google, and making a spooky ghost of Harry Potter appear mysteriously in the reading room thanks to photoshop.

This evening images from the moon were revealed to the general public from NASA, astonishing many.

This image was fairly easy to create after searching through YouTube ‘how to’ videos. However, the actual quality of the photo isn’t great, as it can clearly be observed that the cats in the image have been photoshopped in. If this photo had been revealed some fifty years ago, it may have been much for effective in deceiving others, yet with the rapid advancements in recent technology, it is highly unlikely that anyone would fall for this hoax. This can be said for image hoaxes in general, as most people are now much more hesitant to believe what the internet has to offer, considering even the technologically impaired (i.e. myself) can create a fake image within a matter of minutes.

When editing this picture, I used an app on my phone called ghost camera; which made things easier by allowing me to insert a ghostly figure into the picture. The most difficult part when making this was trying to get lighting of the ghost just right and finding the right location for the picture. This picture could be convincing to someone who is maybe on the fence on whether they believe in ghosts or not; however someone looking at this came in with a mentality that “ghosts don’t exist” I doubt it will be convincing to them.

I used an app on the iPhone app store called “Face Swap” which is programmed to recognize two faces and swap them and match proportions. It was almost too easy and it created such accurate looking heads that I had to find someone with a darker complexion in order for it to look as if faces had been swapped. That was probably the hardest part. The easiest part was actually creating the edited picture because the app just did it for you after you took the authentic picture. It is not easy to make convincing because many more props are needed to change the setting and give a valid impression so that the actual content (the face swapping) is believable.

The most difficult part in creating this image was conjuring something that would strike viewers as unusual, yet still maintaining a level of refinery to make it conceivable. I chose to play on the superhero idea of the “Invisible Woman”, leaving viewers wondering if there’s actually a woman hidden behind the frame, or if it’s some sort of a disappearing magic trick. Nevertheless, the fascination within the framework in this piece is the main source of speculation.

This image was actually really easy to make since it was accidentally created when my friend tried to take a panoramic picture of the Emory sign and I walked in front of it. As a result, my hand is eerily detached from the rest of my body, which creates a ghost-like effect. This was further enhanced by the darkness surrounding the glowing sign and the dancing shadows. I think the combination of the lighting and the dangling arm makes this photo very convincing.

I honestly have no idea how to use PhotoShop, so I decided to look for an app that would create a supernatural effect in my picture. I found one called Ghost Effects and used it to insert a ghost hand into a picture I took of the Peachtree Road Race. The hardest part was definitely trying to adjust the fading and lighting to make it seem somewhat realistic. If I had seen this picture without prior knowledge that it was edited, I would definitely be creeped out for the guy and question the picture’s authenticity. The easiest part was finding a picture with the right background to have a ghost in without it seeming impossible. Personally, I do not believe in ghosts, so if I were to see this picture I would suspect something was up; however I can only imagine the reaction of someone who does believe in ghosts if they saw this picture.

In the Library, I was looking over my homework thinking on how I might go about doctoring an image, considering my very limited computer skills. So I returned to the knowledge my eighth grade self had gained, and used photo booth effects to take a human altering selfie.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure how convincing this image is, but it doesn’t look quite right, and some people might even believe in it’s ghost/hologram appearance. It wasn’t difficult to make this picture but I was unsure how to make it more compelling. Just beware, of the hologram on the 7th floor of the library!

Sitting out in the middle of a lake on kayaks, my friend and I decided to document our moonlight expedition. After paddling out as far away from shore as possible, we took this picture. I decided to incorporate the ghost face behind us to make the image look creepy when considered within the context of our location. It wasn’t too difficult to add in the image on top of the picture that I had taken on my phone. I used a program called paint.net to add in different layers to my picture and to reduce the quality of the image while intensifying the light to give it an eerie look. It was kind of difficult to match the lighting of the face with ours because the original image I used for the face was very white. However, to someone who didn’t know that they were looking at an image of a fake ghost, the frightening realization that there is something in the background of the image is still genuine.