This contest has prompted many to cheat already - and here you can find some of the best photoshop jobs found to be circulating around in the earliest hours of Hurricane Sandy!
From obvious doctoring of promotional material for films such as The Day After Tomorrow to mere Getty stock photography from several years back already, the trickery factor multiplied exponentially as the media kept on raving about the possibility of this hurricane meeting up with two other systems floating around to become one mega-storm - that it (the media, duh) promptly dubbed ''Frankenstorm'' on this rapidly approaching time of trick-or-treating...
The best coup from all of these bogus pics has to be this one, a ''striking image'' no doubt that is nothing more than a Photoshop job, combining a photo of the New York harbor with a 2004 shot taken by photographer Mike Hollingshead. The treachery was spreading fast throughout social media websites such as Friendface... er... Facebook, of course!
But never mind social media now - and it creating the ideal settings for this sort of tomfoolery in the first place. Traditional media -those who are supposedly there to inform us; the news services originating from television stations, radio or print news- they are the ones responsible for the (near) mass hysteria going on there... (We say ''near-mass hysteria'' because, to be frank, we are worlds away from another occurrence of ''The War of the Worlds'' infamous broadcast, courtesy of one Orson Welles...!) Nevertheless - the media set the standards for this sort of thing, for they stopped just short of this sort of tactics in order to attract an audience or sell copy - and, of course, if we are talking about rags of the order of National Enquirer (to name but one) they did go so far first!
The media is at its gloomy best when it uses graphics rather than faked photography - for it accomplishes what appears to be their primary mandate after all: scaring the masses sh!tless. A well-conceived, sharply introduced computer-generated graphic image of gloom-and-doom, especially one that skillfully presents the humdrum before and most dreaded after there could be...!
Now, I never dreamt of working for a weather channel (nor have I ever had such longings regarding tabloids of questionable integrity, quite obviously!) hence I shall refrain from getting out there, catching pneumonia and being caught up by some whirlwind, all that just to take a good shot I might have to spend an hour doctoring and enhancing, afterwards! A realistic shot of this kind of weather shall be my only contribution this time out: one taken through the window, from the comfort of a vehicle out of harm's way or a solidly anchored vessel! Certainly, I may get more creative again when they get more creative, too - in their name-choosing for those hurricanes, tropical storms and the like...! And in their choice of apocalyptic hoopla whenever ''Mother Nature'' acts up - or simply reacts to what we are putting her through, day in and day out, as good industrialized parasites that we all are!
And so, here is that realistic shot, taken through glass, haze and rain:
It's not going to win anything, eh;
except for 100% realism!
We'll keep on trying - without holding our breath!
See you all on that next occasion we get
to make great shots
with apocalyptic weather
wreaking havoc all around us!
And we know it too:
we will have many, many more
golden opportunities
to do just that!
Sempre Por O Melhor
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