Forged wartime image ?

I bought this postcard from the Rotary Photographic Series online, it says on the back “This is a REAL PHOTOGRAPH from a sketch by our Special Artist” …………so not sure if it’s a photo or a sketch….but has that airship got a mast?

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hi,
the wife found me a copy of FIGHTER by Len Deighton in a second hand shop, and there’s a picture similar to your’s and it’s viewed slightly to the left of centre of the above one and it also show’s 2 radar towers on the extream left, it also as 2 Me.109’s above the 3 tower’s, the caption say’s ” the German view of the Dover radar station’s, technically one of the most impressive photo’s of the war. A 35mm camera was set up by the German’s to photo across the straits of Dover, although not in itself difficult feat, in this case the shutter speed was fast enough to capture the Me 109’s too. Even more interesting is the proof that the German’s could actually see the tower’s of the Dover radar station, yet they did so little to destroy it. From that station RAF operator’s could watch the German aircraft getting into formation’s deep inside France. It is grainy picture…

regards,
jack…

Thanks again to you all. I was not finding much out before this on forging photos before Photoshop ! I knew it happened, but not how.

Can anyone point out anything in the photo that would/not make it infra red ? All the IR images I have found on the web have that ghostly look about them.

Having had the chance to work wth traditional “film” based photographic processes, and access to dark rooms, enlargers and print developing equipment back in my senior school/sixth-form days I can confirm that it is relatively easy to “doctor” prints (and/or negatives or colour slide images). Artefacts can be hand painted on to prints, and the modified print re-photographed, artefacts can be added to the negatives (though I suspect this was a rarer form of manipulation due to the small image to work with) and it is also relatively easy to incorporate portions of one negative into a print made with/from another negative to add things into the overall composition.

Artefacts can be removed by over-painting them, or by physically scratching or cutting them out of the negative, often leaving a “black patch” such as is seen on many wartime images of aircraft when serial numbers or new weaponry was deemed “secret”. Government censors literally took a razor blade to the original negative and cut the secret item out of the image.

Even as a ham-fisted amateur it was easy to make this sort of change, albeit leaving clear signs of the “modification”, so a professional “image fettler” in WW2 would have no problem in producing a much more convincing end product.

Sorry to dissillusion the younger “IT-reliant” generation, but digital imaging and image manipulation software (photoshop et al) rarely offers anything that a professional photographer and/or his lab could not have achieved even in the days of wet-film photography – all modern IT does is open up the ability to capture and manipulate images to the masses, and allow such changes to be made to images ever more easily then before.

I have some original wartime press photos which you can see where paint has been applied to give some areas more definition. Presumably it then looked better when it eventually went to print. It’s actually quite subtle, and I guess a lot of images would have had some form of treatment.

The image in the first post needs those balloons to ‘work’. My eyes were first drawn to the white cliffs themselves, but in the context of the War this is hardly the most interesting image. Without the balloons you have a stark image of the cliffs, some antenna and some haze/smoke. None of that tells us anything. The balloons add a sense of urgency to an otherwise ambiguous image.

Thanks for those ! How were images altered back then ? By painting on the image and re-photographing ?

Pretty much 🙂 Literally air-brushing stuff in or out of a photo, cutting and pasting items into them and using dodge and burn in the darkroom.

Of you want to get really serious, machines like this: http://petapixel.com/2014/10/19/adams-retouching-machine-helped-old-school-photoshoppers-retouch-negatives-hand/

Not saying it applies to this picture, but there are a lot of WWII photos that were retouched and possibly look “fake” to our modern eyes. Often it was done because the subject of interest wasn’t clear enough in the source photo and if it was going to be used for newsprint they’d have to touch it up to make it visible.

Thanks for those ! How were images altered back then ? By painting on the image and re-photographing ?

I also meant to point out, and failed to, that that picture was taken from 24 miles away across the Channel, with an infra red camera. I wonder if any photography experts on here can point to any indications of the latter in this image ? I have no idea.

I would have thought it was probably retouched at the time. The ability of wartime airbrush illustrators was well in advance of the average person using photoshop today, and retouched images are hard to determine as a result.
There are all kinds of reasons why pictures were retouched for publication, and, for example, searching the National Archives, often doesn’t reveal that the images were altered in any way, so sometimes they will end up being published in books as-is.

Pete

It is certainly within the technical capabilities of wartime photographic alteration.

Another book by Alfred Price, ‘The Hardest Day’, has before-and-after shots taken by low-level German aircraft that were attacking Kenley airfield. The (well known) photographs have been doctored to add white smoke around a Spitfire sitting (unharmed) in an ‘E-pen’; although they are rare actual combat-shots it was clearly felt by the Germans that they were not dramatic enough for publication!