Digital Camera World

In case you missed the buzz, there was a controversy over the photographer who took the photo that was the source for Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama HOPE prints.

Earlier, reports circulated that it was a photo from TIME magazine which was reversed and stretched slightly. That photo was credited to Jonathan Daniel of Getty Images, but this turned out to be incorrect. The correct match is a photo taken by Manny Garcia – a freelance photojournalist based in Washington D.C. The photo was taken of then Senator Obama as he was addressing the National Press Club about his recent visit to Darfur.

The first correct ID using overlays was posted on Flickr by “stevesimula”. Idée Inc. (TinEye) took a more sophisticated approach using their image comparison engine PixID. PixID takes a detailed look at the patterns of the pixels images, creating digital fingerprints of the source and target images. It can find a small partial match in the fingerprints, even if the images have been heavily transformed. Edits can include crops, flips, rotation, skews or as in this case – posterization of the image.

TinEye’s PixID can also calculate a sub-pixel accurate transformation matrix that shows how the images best align to each other. They used that to produce the image overlay shown above. Mannie Garcia’s photograph was the best match.

References
fairey poster photo source?
Will the real Obama Hope photograph stand up?
Mystery Solved -Again!
The Obama HOPE Photo Mystery Continues!
Photo source for Barack Obama presidential campaign “HOPE” poster discovered

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