Remember when Photoshop Was a Place to Take Your Photo's To?

Any regular visitors to YouTube will likely have seen a couple of videos that display how computer software such as Photoshop can take an average looking woman and nip/tuck/bleach/brush her into the uber-model that you see on billboards. It’s pretty scary to be honest to see how photos can be manipulated today. Back before digital photography most of us took a picture with our 35mm camera, waited between 1 hour and 7 days to get the photos developed and simply accepted the images as is.

I can think back to all the photos I took using film and remembering the anticipation as to what they would look like after being developed. Naturally there were always those that I looked at and thought “What the heck was I doing?!” However there was always the odd photo that due to a particular circumstance actually presented me in a better light than perhaps there should have been.

I remember a time back in High School when I was in Grade 10 and was the Quarterback on the Jr. Football team. On a Thursday we had just lost a quarter-final game to our rivals from Northern Collegiate and were finished for the season. The next day, while discussing our loss at school I had an “Incident”, shall we say, with a fence that surrounded the school field. While taking a short cut I attempted to show a little bravado and tried to leap over the fence in a way that only “Cool” Football players would do, and the fence apparently took issue with being made to look silly. I swear it reached out and grabbed my pant leg as I flew over it which then caused me to land awkwardly, roll down a hill and forced my ankle to introduce itself to a nearby tree. The end result was that I fractured my ankle and was put into a cast for 4 weeks.

On the following Tuesday the Football team was scheduled to have its Yearbook photo taken. Well between the end of the season and the taking of the photo I had added an ankle cast as a new accessory and when the photo was taken I posed while standing at the side on crutches. While most people at school knew that the broken ankle wasn’t due to playing Football (They also never knew the truth since I was alone when it happened and I embellished the cause), when you look at the Yearbook photo years later, you would think it was injured during the game. I remember showing an old girlfriend the photo years later and she was impressed at how supposedly “tough” I was back in High School.

I wonder nowadays with all the tricks one can do to manipulate photos if someone had tried to superimpose something like a cast on themselves to make them seem more heroic? If so I suppose I could then launch into one of those “Back in my day we actually had to break our ankles to have a photo with a cast on” rants. When I was young I always wondered about how those rants originated, but as I grow older I seem to have no difficulty creating my own.