There’s one kind of spam you can’t quite filter out. The emails your friends send. I guess it’s keeping us in touch… kind of.
So I got sent a photograph the other day. You might have seen it; it’s supposed to be a ghost picture. Five young women are having their picture snapped while a little girl cries loudly in protest, refusing to take part because “the little boy is scaring her”. Sure enough, look closer and you can see a spectral child peering from between the women’s legs.
The next day I got another email apologising that the photograph was apparently a fake. A friend-of-a-friend had seen it and declared it was “photo-shopped”, a new word creeping into our lexicon. Exactly how he could tell this from an emailed JPEG is a bigger mystery than the supernatural bit.
Here’s another story. Years ago I was researching a horror novel and came across a fascinating photograph. A young (childless) couple were driving to visit friends in their new house. Somewhere short of their destination they stopped at a phone booth to get exact directions. Thus when they arrived at their host’s home the friends were already waiting on the front lawn and took a picture of the occasion - the car pulling into the driveway. Days later, when they developed the film, a forlorn-looking girl can be clearly seen sitting in the back seat peering out the window. They had picked themselves up a ghostly hitchhiker. Trick photography had been around about a hundred years, but the likes of Photoshop weren’t even a gleam in Bill Gates’ eye. The chances of this particular photograph being genuine are quite high. It’s downright creepy.
I sit in my modest recording studio and help people who can’t hit a note sound like Christina Aguilera (who can sing) or John Farnham… it’s tough work. However, some singers I meet are exceptionally talented.
And last night I watched the latest Indiana Jones movie. Indy’s getting a bit tired, but you can’t fault the special effects.
Thanks to a plethora of digital software we now believe anything clever, impressive or impulsive must be a fake. It’s been photo-shopped, pitch-corrected or blue-screened. It’s a damned shame that many creative things that are truly impressive are assumed to be enhanced. That one-in-a-million photograph, the perfect vocal take, the video camera that, by careful planning, recorded history in the making. The best artistic endeavours are always judged guilty, before proven innocent of fakery.
All this new technology is supposed to be opening our minds, not closing them. No one likes to be deceived and it’s wise to be wary, but don’t be too quick to dismiss anything that’s remarkable either.
Personally I prefer to believe a ghostly young rascal wanted to sneak into someone’s snapshot. Stranger things have happened. Next time you’re out driving alone, be sure to check the back seat.