Don’t Respect the Wolf

I was reading through some news stories online today while I waited for the overworked printer in the Management office to chug through the articles I’m supposed to bring to class on Tuesday, and I noticed a certain amount of controversy over Photoshop, and the modified pictures it can produce. Some people have gone to great lengths to express their disapproval and dismay at these pictures; the reactions range from calls for stronger self-regulatory measures within the various media to t-shirts that mock bad Photoshop work being sold on the “Fail Blog” website. It’s a silly thing to get worked up over, of course – retouched pictures and other photographic fakes have been around for over a century and easily predate the electronic computer itself, and they’ve never actually brought down our civilization. But then I noticed a story that proves you don’t even need Photoshop to throw a spanner in the works…

A story available on the UPI Online “Odd News” page details the controversy surrounding the winning entry in the British Natural History Museum’s annual photography contest, which has now been disqualified because the photo depicts a rented wolf. I was not previously aware that it was possible to rent large carnivores for photo shoots, but it appears that this particular wolf, named “Ossian,” is a well-known specimen from a wildlife park outside of Madrid. The Museum is insisting that the photographer return the cash prize ($16,300 USD), and says it intends to ban him from future competitions. Meanwhile, other nature photographers (and zoologists) are saying that the Museum should have known the photograph was a fake immediately, since the wolf in it is hurdling a fence like a racehorse, instead of sensibly pushing through the opening in the rails, the way an actual wild animal would…

My immediate reaction was “you can’t blame a guy for trying,” followed by puzzlement that anyone really cares if the wolf is wild, rented or part of a three-year carnivore lease program from GMAC. Unless the contest specified that the photos had to be of wild animals, captured in the wild by a photographer who had slept on the ground and eaten freeze-dried beans for a week, in order to qualify, I can’t imagine why it matters where, when or how the winning entry was obtained. It’s not like the animal in the picture isn’t actually a wolf, or that wolves can’t (or for that matter absolutely wouldn’t ever) jump over fences, especially if there are tasty farm animals on the other side. But I think the key thing to consider here is that there was almost certainly someone going over these pictures to make sure they hadn’t been altered in Photoshop (or the equivalent), and that individual did not notice anything was wrong – because he or she was probably just looking for digitally altered photos, and this one hadn’t been tampered with. It just wasn’t real in the first place…

The lesson here is that the threat isn’t always where you expect it to be, and the counter-measures you’ve emplaced aren’t always the right ones. You could have hired the MIT Media Lab to analyze this picture, spent tens of millions of dollars going over it pixel by pixel, and still never spotted a hoax that was created using a method that would have been possible a century ago. Computerized security is only as good as the people using it, and if the managers involved don’t stop to consider the possibilities, then there’s an excellent chance that the product you just bought really exists, and does what the seller claims it does, but is still not what it appears to be. Because, let’s face it: sooner or later, somebody is going to present you with your industry’s equivalent of a rented wolf. The question is, are you going to notice that they’ve done so…