We chose this photo as our ‘Photo of the Week’, firstly because we are fast approaching Christmas and wanted to get into that festive mood! Another great aspect of the photo is the angle, it has managed to capture the entire, rather large, Christmas tree, made entirely of toys! It has also incorporated a variety of different colours from both the tree and stores surrounding it.
We like this picture for a number a reasons, including how the rain creates a reflection on the pavement, and the contrast between the BIG red bus in comparison to the little eco-cars. The interesting story it tells about the eco-cars driving as far as they can on 1 litre of fuel is just a bonus.
Every photograph we encounter these days, whether on the side of a bus, in our local newspaper or on a computer screen has been retouched or manipulated digitally in some way, most likely using Photoshop. This is not a new phenomenon, in fact image manipulation followed very swiftly after the invention of photography in 1839. People wondered how a medium that could render forms and textures with such exquisite detail not show colour, so photographers began using manual intervention with oil paint and powdered pigmentation to bring added life into the images for their customers. In the 19th Century there was even a trend for images to feature fake decapitation, and of course, there was the famous Cottingley Fairies. These were a series of five images taken by two young girls Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. They showed the girls posing in a garden with magical sprite like creatures. They had many fooled, even the crime writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a spiritualist, was enthralled by them, and for many years they were accepted as genuine until the 1980s, when the not so young girls, admitted they were faked using cardboard cut-outs.
Every so often I’ll hear or see an interview that’s memorable for all the wrong reasons. Over the weekend, it was the TalkTalk Chief Executive, Dido Harding, who caught my attention. She was on Saturday PM on BBC Radio 4 to talk about the company’s response to a cyber attack, that saw customers’ financial information, including bank account and sort code numbers, stolen by criminals. As she tried downplay the extent of the cyber attack, the presenter challenged Ms Harding, stating that the security breach at TalkTalk meant scammers were well-armed to defraud people.