A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
As expected, Hillary Clinton announced today, through a 139-second video, Getting Started, that she’s running for President. The back of Clinton’s head appears at the 92-second mark; her face, a second later.
If you think the video’s dark, you’re right. The video’s tonal range is deliberately compressed on the low side. I examined the opening frame using Adobe Photoshop’s densitometric tools. Ninety-nine percent of the lightness values fall below 175 on a 0–255 scale where zero is black and 255 is white. It may be a computer simulation of the bleach-bypass process, but it seems to me to be closer to a straight one-stop reduction in exposure combined with desaturated color.
The dark and fuzzy ambience may be intended to suggest that the demographic groups appearing in the video are in social and economic shadows from which they will be rescued by Hillary — the video is rife with dog whistles — but for me, the darkness suggests what it would be like were I to start losing my eyesight.
The video is available in resolutions as high at 1920 pixels wide, and can be downloaded from YouTube in the MP4 format by applications such as MacX YouTube Downloader, the basic version of which is free. A useful still image of HRC can be easily extracted from the video.