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Richard Duthie: Shapershifter?

Friday, 28 September 2007, 12:03 pm
Column: Lyndon Hood

Richard Duthie: Shapershifter?

Lyndon Hood watches the media. For real.

I was pleased to hear of the capture of Richard Duthie. And I'm amazed people knew what he looked like at all, what with the distorted proportions of some of the photos that have been in the media.

The other week, when police declared they were looking for him Scoop received the official mugshot in the email. I happened to be checking the email; when I looked at the image file in Pegasus (Scoop's email client of choice) it looked something like this:

It's just as well I had that version, because when I opened the file in my image editor, it looked like this:
stretchy
version

It's possibly that stretched-out effect is due to an image-file obscurity known as pixel aspect ratios, which can be fixed by fiddling with certain little-used Photoshop controls. I didn't bother trying to confirm this - I just used a screenshot of the image as it appeared in Pegasus, as that looked least like the incredible stretchy man (proving that some cameras add more the five pounds). This may have been lazy of me, but it seems I'm not alone.

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For example, even now TVNZ's website doesn't seem to have noticed a problem:

Whereas TV3 obviously did but may have gone a bit heavy on the horizontal compression:

As far as the Herald is concerned Mr Duthie seems to have lost some weight between his flight and his capture:
herald
1

And judging by pages found on Stuff using Google (Stuff's own search returned no results for 'Duthie'), the fugitive got plenty of exercise between the 3rd and his appearance in the Manawatu Standard on the 12th:
stuff
1

I'm looking forward to new photographs of Duthie.

If his face actually does look like a plasticine man who's been run over by a steam roller, I naturally apologise to all concerned.

********

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