British soldier torture pictures - a photographer's analysis
We asked our resident photographer to take a look at the photographs published by the UK Mirror that allegedly show British troops torturing an Iraqi prisoner. There’s no shortage of analysis of the content of the images, but we’ve seen very little analysis of the technical characteristics of the photographs. Here’s our photographer’s take:
The photographs were taken inside, with some ambient light provided by a window or other diffuse source – probably not a point-source like a bright lamp. Most of the light in the photographs comes from a flash.
The camera was probably not an SLR, but a compact point-and-shoot. The direction of the shadows suggest the flash is located slightly above and to the photographer’s right of the lens. A professional digital or film SLR of the type carried by photojournalists would cast shadows from either directly above the lens (in a horizontal frame), or directly to one side (vertical frame), not above and right. Objects in the foreground are mostly washed out, which suggests the absence of a sophisticated flash metering system. There is some difference in the degree of wash-out between the Mirror and Guardian copies of the photographs, so it’s difficult to say whether the exposures are the result of a poor metering system, or merely a mediocre one.
The photographs probably weren’t taken with a traditional black-and-white film. The red portion of the Iraqi flag on the prisoner’s t-shirt (which, curiously, is lacking the Arabic text seen on modern versions) shows up as mid-gray, a lighter shade than the green stars. Most traditional B&W films don’t have a strong response to red light, so red objects tend to show up very dark. Few films, even the commonly available C41 process B&W films (the kind that can be processed at 1-hour colour labs) tend to show both red and green as relatively light shades, particularly with red appearing as lighter than green. We should note however that this could be affected by the particular colour shades (and even types of inks) used to print the shirt – a reflective red could well show up as lighter than a matte green. And the photographs do have a certain silky, low contrast look characteristic of C41 process B&W. They don’t look much like desaturated colour from a digital camera, though such things can be adjusted to give a different appearance.
The lack of motion blur in the “action” photo is not unusual for a flash photograph. Most on-camera flashes have a cycle time of somewhere between 1/1000 and 1/20000 of a second, depending on the exposure conditions. Even at 1/1000 of a second (unlikely), the soldier’s movement would have to be as fast as a pro golf swing to show any motion blur. Thus the photographic evidence doesn’t necessarily support the conclusion that the soldier was not moving.
None of the images available for review are large enough to judge the quality of the lens. There’s no sign that the images are soft, as you’d expect from a disposable camera, but they may have been sharpened for publication. And it’s difficult to guess it’s focal length, since the published photographs may have been cropped. However it’s worth noting that, given the confines of the truck, they appear to have been taken with a mid-wide lens – somewhere around 35mm wide, maybe wider if they have been cropped. Certainly no longer than 50mm. The focal length appears to be similar in all 5 images, suggesting they could have been taken with a fixed-focal-length lens, such as the kind found on inexpensive and disposable cameras.
Kodak sells a C41 process B&W disposable camera, but (as with most compact cameras) its flash is on the photographer’s left. All five images indicate a flash on the photographer’s right; if one was flipped, then all 5 were. A RHS flash is uncommon on any kind of camera, since it would easily be obscured by the photographer’s fingers.
Another possibility is that all the photographs were taken in a vertical orientation and then cropped. To rotate a typical camera so that the flash is at the photographer’s top-right would require orienting the shutter relase button towards the bottom, and (probably) looking through the viewfinder with one’s left eye – certainly not the usual way of holding a camera.