Barack Obama's Secret Past (Pics That Lie)

"They're sort of in a conflict with themselves for wanting to accept the hot stuff. Sometimes they accept less-than-ideal material." - John Krueger (taken from the article "Journals Find that Many Images in Research Are Faked")

I chose a picture of Barack Obama giving some sort of speech, with just a plain colored background. I pulled this image from Google images, and it was a pretty neutral picture, so I figured I could place it into any situation. I chose Obama because he is the most well-known figure in America and I chose to portray him speaking in front of a background of the Black Panther Party to make it controversial. To manipulate this image, I used the "Magic Wand Tool" to remove

Obama and the microphone from the original picture. Then I put in the background and converted it all to back and

white to match. I then adjusted the contrast to make the pictures blend together better. As mentioned before, the reason for making this was just to be very controversial, but it is harmful in its portrayal of Obama. It associates him with a Black Power Party with socialist and communist doctrines and it was very controversial in its practices. It is in no way realistic, but it would certainly still be considered a harmful manipulation. It goes to show that with modern editing programs,

pictures can be manipulated in ways that they were never meant to be and taken way out of context. Do your research and make sure that pictures that you are viewing come from reliable sources and are not taken out of context.

PowerPoint Presentations

My favorite presentation so far has been Will Prudich's "Bonobo" Presentation. It discussed the behavior of Bonobo monkeys. The content was good and relevant to the topic throughout. Not only was it entertaining, but it also followed many of the guidelines for what makes a good powerpoint presentation. It applied the same background for each slide and had clear, readable text that was easy to look at as a viewer. There were not any crazy or distracting animations within the main part of the presentation and the pictures and sounds used were appropriate for the message that he was presenting. Although the presentation seemed like a joke, it was actually well-done in terms of organization and design.

Another good presentation was conducted by Caroline Arroyo. It had very good information on how to handle the task of the audition in theatre. It had great information on the subject and, in my opinion, it was superior in design compared to all of the presentations. The background designs were very clear pictures and all had the same theme. All of the transitions flowed smoothly from one to the next. Everything down to the text style was relative and applied to her theme nicely.