“You’d have designers looking for photos for the website they were designing, and if they didn’t have a big budget, they’d steal the photos. Sometimes, for pretty big companies. Pro photographers started asking for software that would help track their photos . . . online photographs are basically enormously long strings of pixels that are unique—no two photos are exactly alike on the pixel level. You put in your string and the software looks for a matching string. Eventually, it got sophisticated enough to match faces.”
“Audrey wanted to match her face?”
Blake nodded. “Yeah. She wanted to see if her face was getting to be known. It’s not, much, there are only about a zillion girly websites doing what she’s doing, though she’s actually got some decent sponsors. Anyway, we found some headshots of her. One of them, a shot I took, was on the Nazi site. They lifted it off her blog.”
“Audrey said you had some ideas about the cameras used in the other photos.”
“Not the cameras so much as the lenses. The way the images are compressed, and the thin depth of field . . . you know about depth of field?”
“Yes, some.”
“Well, the combination of compression and thin depth of field tell you the pictures were taken with a telephoto lens. The same one, I think. All outdoors, in good light, but from long distances. To get those close-up headshots, they had to crop the photos quite a bit, then blow up what was left. That’s why they look a little grainy. If I had to guess, I’d say a decent one-inch camera with a long zoom lens. There are a lot of those around. Uh, you know about metadata?”
“Yes. Information attached to photographs, usually including camera settings and a time-and-date stamp.”
“It was stripped off the photos. I looked,” Blake said.
“Then the photographer is fairly sophisticated?”
He shrugged: “Everything you’d need to know, you could learn in an hour. So, no, he’s not necessarily sophisticated. He’d have to know about the metadata to get rid of it, but if he knew, then stripping it off is easy.”
“You know a lot about photography,” Lucas said.
“Blake had his own darkroom for film cameras, when he was twelve,” Mary Ellen said. “He and his dad built it in our basement, in Birmingham.”
“Dad said if I was serious about it, I should start with film,” Blake said. “I moved to digital pretty quick, but . . . film is good. Knowing about it.”
“How did you and Audrey start working together?”
Blake threw a quick glance at his mother and Lucas suspected he wouldn’t be getting the full story.
“We’re friends, from school,” he said. “She dated a friend of mine for a while. Then she started doing her website with, you know, selfies that she took with her iPhone. She even made phone videos of herself, really bad videos. Later she tried a real camera, a point-and-shoot that wasn’t much better. She’s smart, and she knew she had to step up her game. She knew I was into photography and video and we did a couple of shoots. She got some sponsors and started throwing a few bucks my way. Now we’ve got a thing going.”
Blake said that he didn’t know anything especially interesting about the 1919 site, except that the people who had put it up didn’t know much about creating a website: “It’s crude. There are fifth-graders who could have done it better. They took crappy photos and slapped them on a preformatted form, along with the texts. The texts were ripped off from right-wing websites. They didn’t even bother to change the fonts on the texts they took—they cut and pasted them, so they all look different, which is not a good look, technically speaking.”
Mary Ellen said, “Blake told me something that you might be interested in, but he didn’t want me to tell you. I’ve decided to tell you anyway.”
Blake: “Aw, jeez.” He flopped back on the couch. “Audrey will kill me.”
“We won’t tell Audrey,” Lucas said. To Mary Ellen: “What am I not supposed to know?”
“Blake said that Audrey got excited when they figured out what