Charles Johnson, (at Little Green Footballs) makes some observations about the plumes of smoke:

“This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop “clone” tool to add more smoke to the image.”

More at LGF here. The photographer is Adnan Hajj.

Remember the name because apparently he’s rather infamous over at LGF and Internationally, unfortunately, I think the last few days of photograph creation have come crashing in on him. The pressure of taking pictures of dead people who were packed in refrigerated trucks from Tyre and the staged photographs supposedly taken in a farmer’s basement but which appeared as though they were taken in a bomb shelter- must have been too much for him–because it’s pretty obvious now that Adnan Hajj isn’t even trying anymore.

One of the most hilarious observations about this photograph is this one by Jeff Harrell:

Adobe Photoshop has a tool that pretty much all artists and photographers adore and revile in equal proportion. It’s called the clone stamp tool, and basically what it lets you do is take pixels from over there and put them over here. It’s essentially a cut-and-paste paintbrush.

Used wisely it’s a good tool for, for example, airbrushing out specks of dust or scratches on film. But no matter how a Photoshop newbie might be tempted by it, it is not a good tool to use for replicating large areas of a photograph. Because all you can do is take a piece of the picture and reproduce it someplace else, it’s very easy to introduce subtle patterns into a photo, especially in the background, that the eye can pick up on. If somebody overuses the clone stamp tool, you won’t necessarily be able to pinpoint exactly what the problem is, but you’ll know something is off.

By all appearances, it looks like Adnan Hajj used the clone stamp tool about sixty-three zillion times to paint more smoke into the sky above Beirut.

How do we know that? Because Johnson appears to have found the original. It was taken on July 26, 2006, credited to the Associated Press, by Ben Curtis, and here it is:

Saudi-owned Reuters then admitted that they altered this photograph from Beirut, after numerous bloggers wrote into Reuters asking questions about it.

Malkin points out that Adnan Hajj, the photographer of the Beirut photo is the same photographer who produced this photograph of Green Helmet holding this baby by the neck- from the alleged Qana ‘massacre’. I didn’t post the picture in my previous post about the propaganda emerging from Qana, but now it seems to have even more relevance, and I sincerely hope that Howard is watching. Howard, if you might recall, was feigning his moral superiority because I wasn’t accepting what the media was saying about the supposed ‘civilian deaths’ in Qana. At Dan Riehl’s (tip o’ me tam to the Confederate Yankee again) we get a more complete story about Qana and the alleged ‘civilian massacre’. In the days leading up to the Israeli attack on Qana, a man by the name of Abu Shadi, a mortician from the hospital in Tyre, had been driving refrigerated trucks packed with dead bodies. Before the media arrived at daybreak, refrigerated trucks arrived in Qana from Tyre. The man known now in the sphere as “Green Helmet” who was holding that dead toddler high in the air for photogs by the neck, is a man named Abu Shadi.

I wonder how much Adnan Hajj gets paid for these photographs, and if he split his ‘take’ with Abu Shadi. After all, Shadi drove those dead people all that way. And I wonder how much of that money goes to their friends at Hezbollah.

Whether it’s playing the sympathy card by parading dead babies in front of cameras (in the style of Saddam Hussein), or photoshopping for dramatic effect, it seems as though al-Reuters has lost a great deal of credibility over the last week or so, and now the ’scoop’ has turned from ‘innocent civilians and children’ victimized by nasty Israel, to al-Reuters’ complicity with Hezbollah in their propaganda campaign.

Yes, “Howard”, this is war. It’s a propaganda war, and they’re not going to get away with it. Say “hi” to your friends in Madison, will you?

Hey “Howard”-Game. Set. Match.