Update: Reuters issues a correction. And looking at the original photograph, it sure looks like those buildings were copied as I describe below. Why? That I can't figure. Maybe the Israelis weren't using big enough bombs to make big enough explosions to satisfy Reuters. Damn precision weapons and their pinpoint destruction!
Michelle Malkin and others are considering this example of what appears to be crude photographic fakery at Reuters:
Professional photographers are debating the Hajj photo at SportsShooters.com and they smell something funny, too.
Here's the original photo by Adnan Hajj:
The focus is on the smoke billowing high above the city. The repeating smoke pattern is pretty obvious and discussed in detail.
One could argue that this was an example of "cleaning up" a photo taken a step (or about thrity steps) too far. After all, it's just smoke, right? Maybe the editor wanted a photo of certain dimensions, and someone decided to clone the sky and smoke upwards. That doesn't make it right, but then there was already smoke in the photo coming out of that city block, right? The facts haven't changed about that city block in Beirut being hit by an Israili bomb.
What city block? Compare these two areas. I've circle two portions of the photo, each including at least two distinct buildings.
Now Charles Johnson has already carefully considered the building with the distinct balconies. But check out the building in the left of each circled area:
Here is a close-up of the area:
Zoomed in, it still looks suspicious. So I tried overlaying one area on the other, as Johnson did with the one building:
I moved the centre portion of the upper allegedly cloned area down to centre of the lower portion.
Sure looks like a perfect lining up of picture elements. Remember, what is remarkable here is that at least two different buildings being considered here, not just one building whose architecture might have been repeated on a nearby city block.
If I wanted to construct an image of a bombing, one of the trickiest bits would be to make it appear that the smoke was billowing in front of some building but behind others. A photo is a projection of a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane. All the 3D information is lost. So what you have to do is fake 3D space by layering 2D sheets in order. What might be happening here is that a photo of Beirut has smoke overlayed on it. Then a cut-and-paste of the bulidings at the lower portion of the photo is offset down and to the left, and placed over the smoke and the original background picture. After some judicious fogging, it looks like the smoke is rising from in between buildings.
Why do it this way? Why use these buildings? The problem is scale and lighting. If I grabbed buildings from another portion of the photo, they would look wrong. Too small or too big. Wrong shadows. That sort of thing. The easiest way to insert buildings into a photo such that they look like the other buildings in the immediate area is to actually close buildings from the immediate area to duplicate.
And then just hope no one notices.
