Comments on: How light or dark is Barack Obama's skin? Depends on your political stance…

By: Bonnie Leland

Bonnie Leland — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:34:38 +0000

Thank you for sharing some good information . Saw your website in Bing. Your website is very great and helpful. I am a bit blase and sad and need someone to talk to, if you are free, cool , and wants to have a great entertainment . contact me tonight @ 712-432-2207.

By: Tony Jeremiah

Tony Jeremiah — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:44:36 +0000

Meier, B.P., Robinson, M.D., Crawford, L.E., & Ahlvers, W.J. (2007). When "light" and "dark" thoughts become light and dark responses: Affect biases brightness judgments. Emotion, 7(2), 366-376.

By: Dr. Kate

Dr. Kate — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:18:40 +0000

Samantha, you’re right, he totally looks like Lister.
Although I agree with many of the posters that lighting etc can make a photo look overexposed/poorly lit/etc, I’m not sure that would explain the experimental results. If it was just the lighting and not the skin tone, I wouldn’t expect such a strong correlation between political views and which photo was chosen. Why would conservatives think an underexposed photo is more representative (i.e., if they just interpret the right-hand photo as underexposed, why would they choose it in preference to the others, which they would presumably recognize as properly exposed)? It seems that if that were the case–if there were easily recognizable problems with the photos–then all of the respondents should have chosen the unaltered photo.
Also, I do agree with other posters that this test suggests racial bias in ALL respondents, not just the conservative ones. Associating positive traits with a person because of said person’s race is still racism, even if it may have slightly more benign effects.

By: Samantha Vimes

Samantha Vimes — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:33:42 +0000

Now that I’ve read Ed’s clarification in the comments.
Okay, so they did show different students lightened and darkened versions of all the photos? Cool, then unless the darkening process actually makes the smile look strange, the experiment is well designed.
And I thought the guy in the bottom photos looked like David Lister from Red Dwarf.
toto, I understand the K!ung-san are looked down on by their darker neighbors. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is a big part of that, but they are distinctively different because of their light skin.

By: Samantha Vimes

Samantha Vimes — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:24:11 +0000

Looks to me like all the photos are of the same skin tone, with more or less light being *reflected*– I would end up assuming some of the photos are taken in harsh lighting, some with reflectors to get a more even tone, and some with a lot of shadowing.
However– the darkest photos make their smiles look less genuine.
Perhaps people have gotten used to how photography effects perception of skin tone… but still judge smiles?
Not that I doubt racism is still very common in society, including subconscious racism. I just don’t think, looking at the photos side by side, it looks like the skin color changes, only the lighting.

By: Susan

Susan — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:35:27 +0000

In commercial advertising, when an African-American couple is portrayed, the male invariably has darker skin than the female. In fact, Barak Obama is one of two men I can remember seeing in the media who has a wife who is darker skinned than he is. I have wondered for years why this is so. I have been told by my African-American friends that lighter skin is preferable, and that some people have “better,” less “nappy” hair than others. If anyone can explain this, I would appreciate it.

By: Donna B.

Donna B. — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 04:39:49 +0000

Paul W. — thank you for the hints, especially about straight-on facing the camera. I have some photos that have turned out OK that way, but they are all with 100+ length lenses. Actually, I was far enough away that they probably were at least 10 degrees off straight on.
And most of them are of babies. Babies are different!
If I had the chance to re-stage the photos of my daughter’s family, I would have had my daughter facing the natural light and my son-in-law getting the fill light from the reflector.
I put six layers of waxed paper over the built in flash on my camera years ago and that has definitely helped. I’m not dealing with redeye anymore, at least. But people are always asking what’s wrong with my camera.
I do want relatively accurate skin-tones, but I’m more interested in getting well-defined facial features and capturing an expression.
Personally, I think all three photos of Obama above are bad, but the middle photo of Iginla is OK.

By: Paul W.

Paul W. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:41:17 +0000

Oh, by the way, the fill flash tip above is especially helpful when taking pictures of both light- and dark-skinned people. It lightens up the dark skin tones, especially the shadowy areas, more than the light skin tones.
(Don’t worry about whether that’s “realistic.” Given the differences between normal viewing conditions and photo-viewing conditions, it’s the least of your problems, and it usually makes things look more realistic overall. You want to get both the highlights and the shadows comfortably within the intensity range of your camera’s sensor, or you’ll get muddy shadows or blown-out highlights. If you’re very worried about “realistic” skin tones, fiddle with the brightness and contrast in an image-processing program later. When shooting, just make sure you get a decent exposure.)

By: Paul W.

Paul W. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:34:10 +0000

A couple more photo tips for anybody who might do this sort of experiment, or just anybody who wants to take good pictures:
1. Don’t take straight-on pictures of people’s faces most of the time, especially if you don’t have good lighting.
Straight-on pictures are much more ambiguous in terms of how to infer shape from shading, because the face is basically symmetrical—the left half of the picture doesn’t give you much different information that the right half.
An off-axis picture (say, 30 degrees off axis) much more clearly and vividly reveals the actual 3D shape of the head and face, because you can see one half-head from a perspective where it’s turned partly toward you, and the other turned partly away. That makes the the shape of the head unambiguious in a way that he viewer’s brain instantly infers the right head/face shape. (The visual cortex is hella good at this, especially with regard to faces but you’ve got to give it some perspective disparity to work with.)
2) Don’t use a typical flash on the camera as your main light if you can avoid it. It makes the lighting weird in a way that the brain does not like at all because you almost never see things lit that way in a pleasant environment. (Even car headlights aren’t that close to the line of sight.) This mis-cues the brain and makes it likely to infer the wrong 3D shape. (Things generally look elongated toward the camera, because the shading is so dramatic as you go far around the sides of objects. Things toward the front part of a curved surface look flattened, though. Bleah.)
If the ambient light level is enough to get by without flash, but your camera has a “fill flash” setting, it’s usually a good idea to use it. (It’s the only thing a flash mounted close to the line of sight is good at.) The fill flash is a weak flash, which doesn’t affect the brighter parts of the image noticeably, but lightens the darker parts a lot. (That’s because of the logarithmic scale of intensity that our eyes use—a little bit of light changes the shadows by a big ratio, and the highlights by a tiny one, because the darkest parts of the image are many, many times darker than the lightest, in terms of raw quantity of light.
Most indoor pictures that most people take suck because of the first two issues, combined. They have people look right at the camera, which is hard on the brain due to lack of depth cues, then use a flash from the camera, which is outright misleading in terms of depth cues.
If you take pictures like that, the camera always lies, because you are basically lying to the camera both by omission (of perspective) and explicitly (by bogifying the lighting).
Some people may look better in pictures like that, but the large majority of people look worse. (My wife being a really vivid example—she’s actually nice looking, but most people take ugly pictures of her. By following the above guidelines, I can consistently take nice-looking ones.)

By: Donna B.

Donna B. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:39:24 +0000

Three thoughts.
1) If the people who agreed with Obama and tended to vote for him thought his skin was lighter than it is… AND if they were white people, isn’t that racism just as much (and perhaps less realized) than those who thought he was darker because they disagreed?
2) Paul W. (#20) is absolutely right. Plus, anyone who has fiddled with photographs in any photo program can recognize artificially lightened and darkened photos. I’m not a professional photographer, but I’m a decent amateur and the most difficult shots I’ve taken were of my pale-skinned daughter, her dark-skinned husband, and their in-between baby.
3) I’ve noticed that in the south, very light-skinned white people with pale blue eyes and natural white-blonde hair are considered ‘dumber’ than if their eyes are darker blue and their hair has a more golden/brown tint.