It’s all in the edit
What a palaver.
Some rich bird decides to do herself a favour and tries to retouch out a few “imperfections” in a family photo, and the world literally gans mad. The recent furore over the Princess of Wales’ attempts at retouching (as opposed to editing, which ids the curation of images meant for retention) is the most ridiculous waste of space i’ve seen in a long time. Even that left-wing bastion of fair play - The Guardian - has indulged itself with a detailed forensic examination of the shite family photo, detailing 20 areas of amateur botchism across the canvas. Various picture agencies have ordered the distribution of the image to be immediately curtailed across all media while more and more news sources uncover more and more rookie retouching errors.
The picture was shot by the king-in-waiting himself using some type of Canon DSLR and a 50mm f1.2 lens at f3.2. The depth of field at f3.2 would have been extremely shallow, so it appears that a number of frames were used to try and extrapolate sharp areas to make a “patchwork” final frame. While this would work with a stationary subject and a stationary camera, it’s never going to be an effective tactic when shooting family portraits handheld, so the resulting final frame, while looking fine to the casual observer, will be full of small abberations ready to be uncovered by the army of twats whose raison d’etre is the discovery of unintended errors in order to propagate discord and ridiculous conspiracy theories with a view to furthering their “likes” on some shite social media thing.
If my library of images were unleashed at full resolution to the crazy brigade, they’d discover occasional faint, ghostly images of myself pointing a flash to the ceiling, strange reflections in mirrors, and all sorts of digital artifacts that haven’t been brushed out of semi transparent layers. It’s a result of the workload pressure which causes mistakes to be made, but are an acceptable by-product of the retouching process that simply can’t be noticed when the images are being displayed at web-resolution on mobile devices etc.
And… the nippers have their fingers crossed because it’s one of the tricks deployed to make nippers smile for the camera…. just like when I make a “Meeaow” sound when photographing dogs.
Rant over.
