Hapgood

So nobody took me up on my trace a viral photo challenge. I’m disappointed in you all. It’s like you have jobs or something.

In any case, I’ve walked through the solution to one of the images in a video. For what it’s worth I recorded the video without sound so that I could concentrate on what I was doing and then went back and narrated, which means the actions and words are not precisely synced. I also in the original video went much further and nailed down the precise time of the event, photographers involved and such, but here I wanted to stop at a simple solution most people could do before retweeting.

So here is the photo.

The questions were:

• Was it staged? Photoshopped?
• Was it a National Geographic videographer who was attacked?

We find that it wasn’t staged or photoshopped, but that there is no evidence that the videographer was from National Geographic. Here’s how we do that in 90 seconds.

As I said, the original video went longer and gathered more information about the event and the people involved. But it’s this first 90 seconds that is crucial.

I’ll also say that this turned out to be an easy one, since the event was covered by Reuters, a reliable news agency that publishes stories worldwide. But the techniques on more difficult material look the same.