full moon, originally uploaded by alexo05.

me escondo detrás de la luna que brilló como no lo hacía en 15 años…

Thought I’d add a little more context to this assignment for my Photography and Social Change class. In light of the recent news that Detroit’s big 3 car manufacturing companies want a bailout, it strikes me as poetically just that the demise of the American auto industry is pretty much a self-served cocktail mix of failed energy policy, dull products and marketing, and inefficient machines.

Some more context: 10 cars that sank Detroit - U.S. News

Doug McMillend, an awesome amateur photographer based in Decatur, Ga, sent an email to my job (Creative Loafing) asking where we’d gotten our Urban Explorer placeholder icon from, as it looks eerily similar to his photograph of the Downtown Atlanta Skyline.

He said he didn’t mean to imply that they’re the same, but he just wanted to know where the image came from.

As an amateur photographer myself, I decided to break the two photographs down to see if I could deduce whether they are one and the same.

First, I took Doug’s photo and cropped it to an area with the same dimensions as our UrBex placeholder (150px by 168px). Second, I had to manually change the aspect ratio of Doug’s photo (changing the horizontal scale while keeping the vertical scale the same) to fit all the buildings that you can see in our placeholder image.

(I also don’t have the original image we used for our placeholder thumbnail).

Third, I tried to adjust levels, colors, saturation, hue, etc, on Doug’s photograph to try and match the same colors on ours. I couldn’t. You see, the difference in temperature is natural due to the time of day that the two photographs were taken.

How could I tell? Well, Doug’s photograph was taken at a later time at dusk, thus the darker shade in the sky; he also used a faster shutter and/or smaller aperture. The streaks of light are distinct in his image, you could almost count each one of them.

The streaks of light on our thumbnail are more blurry, the shadows are not as intense, and the reflections of the lamplights are not as defined as they are on Doug’s shot.

Yes, very similar photographs; that is a favorite location for many photographers to take the same style of image, but these two are not one and the same.

Needless to say, I did not take either of the two shots. Our shot came from  istockphoto.com.