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Images and reflections

A picture is worth a thousand words — journalists hear and tout this often. But not all pictures convey words — they are also used for relief, for effect, because they look attractive on the page. As this picture did, or so I thought, it was in the Madurai edition, of a pigeon in a pool of rainwater in the Meenakshi temple.

But a retired professor of Physics and an amateur photographer, V. Srinivasan, did not. He declared the picture to be not true, an altered one (shades of Adnan Hajj of Lebanon fame!). The Hindu should not encourage anything fake, said Prof. Srinivasan, who created and ran a photographic club in American College, Madurai.

The professor had a case, I felt. The Hindu's Photo Editor, D. Krishnan, presented the counter. This, he said, was one of four photographs sent by a stringer, who did not have the skills of manipulation. They were directly unloaded from the memory card. Following the professor's criticism, the image was enlarged a hundred times and no abnormality or tampering was found. The process chief concurred with this. The only alteration done in any photograph was to change the brightness or contrast to suit the printing requirements.

That was the point Prof. Srinivasan pounced upon. Altering the contrast is creating a fake, he argued. "Using the physics I have learnt and taught," he said only a fraction of light is reflected from a surface — from water, in this case, it was 2 per cent. Moreover, the bird appeared to be walking, and that should create more ripples than what was seen.

Sound principles of Physics — to be answered by Krishnan's 25 years' experience in newspaper and industrial (including advertising) photography, besides teaching. The amount of reflection, he explained, can be varied using angles. The brightness reflected depends on (1) the angle of light (2) colour and density of the reflecting medium and (3) camera angle. The 2 per cent theory is not applicable.

Any photo that has been altered can be spotted and it is not the practice in The Hindu to indulge in such frauds, Krishnan added. The ripples in the shallow puddle can be seen in the enlargement, he pointed out.

The defence rests.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

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