Latest Posts from Switched

Is the Leica M9 Worth the Hype?

by Jason Rowan on December 3, 2009 at 01:40 PM

HYPE CHECK
Leica M9 Digital Rangefinder Camera

What it is:

The cult of Leica originated in the '40s, when Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Magnum photographers first brought the so-called "decisive moment" into the cultural consciousness. Their startlingly immediate images of street life, war, and people are as fresh today as they were the day they were snapped. The weapon of choice for this school of photographers was the Leica rangefinder, a small, lightweight camera that offered photojournalists an easy way to capture high-quality pictures on the move. Though the film era may be waning, Leica is now producing rangefinders for the era of digital photography, and the M9 is its latest entry into the category. This $7,000 camera is for folks who are serious about their still photography; the M9 doesn't do video.

Rangefinders work in a way fundamentally different from what we've come to accept as standard camera functionality. A standard viewfinder displays only what is in the frame, meaning that elements outside of lens range aren't seen. Therefore, the shot you see in the viewfinder is the shot you get. With a rangefinder, however, you look through a viewfinder that is aligned with the lens but not connected; small marks on the glass delineate the area in frame, with space around the marks remaining visible, allowing you to look further afield when composing the shot. When you drop the shutter, there is no moment of blackness. This lets you focus on your next shot without that momentary disorientation.

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Are These Stars for Real? (Not at All -- They've Been Airbrushed!)

by Jason Rowan on May 19, 2009 at 11:50 PM

In the Golden Era of Hollywood, re-touching photographic stills of movie stars was the standard. The layers of illusion that the studio machine wrapped around the already striking actors was impressive; makeup, ingenious lighting, and delicate, highly sophisticated airbrushing were applied by teams of trained experts. The image you saw of Joan Crawford was unquestionably removed from what the woman would look like without makeup or manipulation. But the limits of the technology -- and the skill and intelligence of the artisans who produced the final images -- kept the bounds of physical reality within check; the stars, while greatly idealized, still looked like themselves.

In the digital age, all that has changed. The explosion of outlets for celebrity imagery (ads, music videos, television commercials and magazine covers) have created a much larger market for retouching, and the digital retouching program Photoshop has met this need (albeit with frequently calamitous results). The ever-increasing celebrity frenzy and fixation on looks promoted by magazines like US Weekly and The Star and sites like Pink is The New Blog have driven standards into a strange, otherworldly zone. The preponderance of plastic surgery, truly heroic dieting and physical training, and overzealous Photoshopping have created a new generation of idealized and, in some cases, not-quite-human images of celebs. While plastic surgery requires some degree of serious contemplation by even the most hardened Botox-junkie, to have your Photoshopper remove every last trace of individuality from your appearance you need only say the word.

Here are just a few of the more notable -- if not notorious -- digital facsimiles.

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Photoshopped Celebs 5

by Jason Rowan on May 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM

4. Shirley MacLaine

The marketing images for the Lifetime movie 'Coco Chanel' feature Shirley MacLaine in a virtually Vaseline-lensed piece of lines-free visual fiction. And she's not playing a young woman! Are we really supposed to accept that a woman who has led such a long, rich life doesn't have laugh lines?

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Photoshopped Celebs 4

by Jason Rowan on May 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM

3. 'The Women'

Featuring an array of women over 40, and several over 50, the DVD packaging for 'The Women' has nary a wrinkle in sight. In fairness to the Photoshoppers, if you watch the trailer, it appears that the women have all had their lines permanently banished to Botox-land (along with their ability to express emotions). Unlike European counterparts like Catherine Denueve, the post-Baby Boomer Hollywood actresses seem to have missed the whole growing-older-gracefully thing. When age- and expression-erasing surgeries combine with the desperate illusion that these women are untouched by time's passage, you get the poster for 'The Women' and the phenomenon known as Photox.

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Photoshopped Celebs 3

by Jason Rowan on May 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM

2. Catherine Zeta-Jones

John Waters said of plastic surgery, "I'm against it. If it's bad you look like someone who moved to Los Angeles and never made it, and if it's good you look like someone else". Apparently, judging from Photoshop Disasters' coverage, Cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden wanted Victoria Beckham for its Colr Intrigue Effects Lipstick campaign. When it couldn't get her, it hired Zeta-Jones instead, and 'shopped her up until she looked pretty much exactly like La Posh. This is how bizarre things get when the connection to physical reality is completely severed; you do indeed wind up looking like someone else.

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Photoshopped Celebs 2

by Jason Rowan on May 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM

1. Dane Cook

In his MySpace blog, Cook took on the designers of the poster for 'My Best Friend's Girl,' in which Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs and Cook all seem to be lit from completely different sources and photographed on continents apart. Cook called the poster "so glossy it makes Entertainment Weekly look wooden", going on to say, "The left side of my face seems to be melting off. I guess I am looking directly into the Ark of the Covenant?" When the celebs themselves are revolted by their overly idealized images, you know things have gone too far.

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