This recent photo shows President Obama, along with a group of White House officials, in the Situation Room. They are watching the Osama Bin Laden capture, and this caught my attention. I applaud the policy of the Obama administration to release press photos to the general public via Flickr. The most interesting information I found, however, was not so much the actual image, but rather the embedded metadata…
Is it Original?
The short answer is: NO. Pete Souza (the official White House photographer) shot this scene in RAW format (*.CR2), and it has been modified a great deal, with the help of the software Photo Mechanic and Adobe Photoshop CS 5 on a Mac. It was also converted into the JPEG format, for easier web viewing.
The Obvious: Blurred Visual Parts
Blurred Image
This is the White House Situation Room after all, where the outcome of entire wars has been decided. So it’s no surprise that they had to blur some details that where too sensitive to show. Actually, more humorous for me was to see that the White House runs their own little Starbucks-style branding: the disposable coffee cup carries the seal of the President of the United States.
The Truth: Camera Details
Pete Souza shot this picture with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II that had a Canon EF35mm (f/1.4L USM) wide angle lens attached to it. This is professional gear, and I assume the quality of the image justifies the $4,000 price tag for it.
The common Exif metadata tags reveal an abundance of picture-taking conditions, such as a 3.6 aperture, a manually set exposure time of 0.01 seconds, an ISO value of 1600 and that the shot was made without flash. Also, the typically very chatty custom Canon metadata tags (known as Exif Maker Notes) have been stripped from the file.
The Metadata Surprises
Exif Time shows 4 PM
President Obama announced the capture of Osama Bin Laden shortly before midnight on May 1st, 2011. Several Exif tags embedded in the picture clearly indicate that these eyeballs, glued to a video screen on the opposite side of the room, are looking at the action at 4.05 PM Washington Time (EDT), more than six hours earlier. The official statement of the White House says only “earlier today”, the metadata give us a much more precise point of time.
The embedded metadata details clearly show that the photo has been edited with Photoshop CS5 on a Macintosh computer the following day. The original name of the RAW file was P050111PS-0210.CR2 and it was edited, converted to JPEG and saved multiple times that day, at 12.23PM, then 1.46PM, then 2.55 PM, then 3.13 PM, then 3.23 PM and ultimately at 5.00 PM. It looks like the White House doesn’t take any changes and reviews its press pictures rather intensely….
The Informative
The picture is stuffed like turkey with content metadata, such as description, copyright, location details (but no GPS) and photographer information, most likely done with the software Photo Mechanic. The tags were embedded in Exif, IPTC (IIM) and XMP blocks, which is helpful to make sure that users will see at least some metadata, no matter how old their softwareor how basic a websites’ metadata support is (I am looking at you, Flickr, Facebook and others).
The icing on the cake would have been a few keywords for easy search indexing and a Spanish version of the description and copyright fields – but no luck here. Not many metadata editors support description fields in multiple languages (our software FileMind does), so maybe this will come in the future.
Oh, and just in case you are in the market for a used Canon EOS 5D Mark II anytime soon: ask the seller for its serial number – you’re in luck if it says 520303004. This would mean you are about to acquire this ‘presidential’ camera that was used to take the picture.
