In human history, we have waddled for more than a century in the availability of "democratically" generated images. Image for the people by the people...

Sure before this, there was plenty of images to see in specific instances, but not by all people and not all images... 
Until the middle of the 1800s, images were mostly the domain of exclusive "clients" such as the kingdom and the church apart from a few trouble-makers like pamphleteers and cartoonists who were few and far in between beheadings. The kingdom in what ever form it was, from the kings, emperors and even to "republics" placed their image also on money designed to show the all powerful influence of the value of the state, be it the king or else. 
Many images were precious and costly, thus housed in bastions such as the Louvre or Buckingham palace, or in the gentry houses, those of noble ranks who controlled the countryside and owned their serfs... 

Sketch books were the secret reference points for artists and rarely seen.... Paintings such as the Mona Lisa sold to a king for more than a king's ransom...
The "images" grew in variety from simple portraits to landscapes, but in general this was an expensive and dedicated work from "artists" who had the technical know-how to paint — as well as the ability to transform what is seen into what should be seen... This is very important. 
There were a few images in books, but the general population was not in possession of such books unless it was a bible, itself un-illustrated and the content of which was heavily controlled by the church. Other books had no images and were in small editions that never reached the multitude of the unwashed... The church had its own images displayed in imposing cathedrals, all created to "teach" the plebs about the bible.. The stories were re-created in glorious stained-glass windows and paintings that were designed to bamboozle the errant spirit into believing the whatever of the beeedangle... 

The invention of photography change this and opened our minds in a way we still can't fathom. 
Although photography was made more and more popular in the early days, it soon followed in the stylistic footstep of the images from the lords and priests to glorify whatever was in the image... Whether it was a family or a baby shot, the image was made to give the best impression, with fake glorious backgrounds and impeccably staged lighting... Though a few more techniques have been added, in areas of photography such as advertising and wedding pictures, the same desire to achieve the "perfect" picture is still with us... The value of the image is there to transpose our idea of things into a perfected illusion of ideal reality. Kings are riding horses in glorious sunsets, like the proverbial cowboys... Meanwhile the painters, all mostly out of a job traditionally used to created precise illusions, started to dabble into the illusions of their sketches and reached new way to dabble such as  impressionism, expressionism and cubism, like Picasso. Others like those of the Dada movement chose to illustrate silliness with real images or objects, and this movement developed  into surrealism where the impossible and the unrelated become mixed...
Through photography, image taking, like in many other areas of human invention let to a valuable freedom of "expression" at all level of society. The democratisation of image-taking has added an enormous dimension to our lives. meanwhile images do not have to be perfect to give us a message, though whether we realise or not, photographs are still full of powerful manipulations, of technical and choice values, imposed upon the images creation and image recognition and acceptance.

Sculpture was another ancient way to transmit a message... The romans had carved many statues to convey the stability and veracity of stories. A bit like these days "if it's black and white — it must be true"... It's not of course, but it has taken a long while for most plebs to realise they have been being taken for a ride... Venus is a piece of marble representing a woman, but is she a goddess?... 

These days, the press is still at it... trying to forge untruth into "true" stories for us to swallow... The Daily Telegraph, for example, is pushing brave shit uphill, with the help of deliberately chosen images and slanted words... For example, Julia Gillard is rarely frowning, and about 98 per cent of the time she carries a serene smile on her face. By contrast Tony Abbott rarely smiles. But guess which images the Shitograph is going to use to "prove" a point?: ... It will be one of Julia with a sad face and one of Tony with a smiling resolve, both being fleeting moments that happened once in a blue moon... Slanted shit? You bet... Images and our choice thereof have their own way to manipulate democracy, by presenting illusions to the masses and to the kings... same with the roman statues, also used to glorify the top doodahs and commissioned by the top doodahs.

The Romans had murals decorating their houses. The peasants of the dark ages had white chalky rendering... Unless one was rich, one could not afford images, unless it was a poor copy of an engraving of the virgin Mary...
The proliferation of photographic images in the 20th century broke down a lot of misconceptions, though many images were created (and still are) to mislead. The animated image (the movies) also changed the length of reality into a concentration of happenings that eliminated the mundane, giving an extra unreal compressed dimension to reality. We accept this readily once quite easily... The image and the moving image becomes entertainment rather than "truth". Of course I have glossed over the long historyl and cultural values of images... I could have gone back to the Spanish painting at Altamira or the older Aboriginal paintings under the overhangs in Arnhem Land... (see http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/6091#comment-8300) 

In another example of picture/human relationship, it is a sin to show images representing the human form, in the Muslim religion... Extremists religious Muslim fanatics thus often destroy images such as when the Taliban destroyed the giant Buddhist sculptures in Afghanistan. Some moderate Muslims are a bit more lenient, but even Muslim extremists will use the power of the image, using video cameras to make a recording of their angry Jihad...
For many Aborigines, showing the image of dead people is like stealing their spirit... Most aboriginal paintings are abstract, but unlike the abstract lines in the pure Muslim tradition, the Aboriginal images express concrete ideas, even acting like "maps" or are representing other creatures... When movies have images of dead Aboriginal people in them, a pre-warning is issued to let Aboriginal people know that should they choose to watch or not, images of the dead are used in the movie.

Now, I have been a "photographer" for many years... as well as doing many other things... I worked professionally for a few years in Europe with various cameras, mostly very expensive gear, including "plate-cameras" in which the negative was around 4  by 3 inches... My dad used to take many photographs before WWII and after the war, he turned his attention to movies... My bellowed-cameras were used for architectural photography and product advertising... the tilting and the offsets of the lens and plate allow for changing the aspect of perspective as well as manipulating the depth of field... Other cameras, such as Hasselblad, like that used during the moon landing, were used for speed of action (though one had to wind a handle for the next shot) in a large format or for the way one could "quickly" bracket the mood and the exposure of a succession of images, be it people or objects. Tripods were a must on most occasion... 
Then, in the darkroom, one could manipulate the intensity of skies, and the contrast of objects, using little masks we'd shake in front of the light from the enlarger... The choice of paper grade (for black and white photography) was all important as well as the manufacturer of the paper... Kodak bit the dust recently... I don't know much about Ilford... I believe it's still going strong in Black and white photography... A lot of what we did was "organic" choices via trial and error experience... Ilford papers were used for certain purposes over Kodak for example... From one to five, the grading gave us the latitude on the contrast... A grade five was used mostly for lettering or for "bit-mapping", while grades 2 to 3 were used for general pictures... 
All this lab work, of course, changed with digital photography... 

All images are made of bits.... from fine brushstrokes of paintings to the grains of silver bromide, all is about the illusion of what we see as a whole... Printed offset images are crude illusions but we, in general still "buy" them in our tiny brains... if your eyes are well trained as mine and still in good nick, you coud be able to see the dots without looking too hard... Though pass 100 dots per inch, I need to use the spy glass... Moss images in magazine use 130 dot per inch, about 60 to 100 dots in newspapers and some newer magazines use a continuous fine dither method of printing in which dots are very small and irregular — similar to that of the original digitisation of the picture. The offset dots are often used for effect when blowing up a portion of an image (see above).
These days a digital image has many variable from sensitivity to the amount of pixels... Not everything is equal. For example some cameras will have 14 megapixels like another one, but some will have an unrefined range of sensibility that will leave dark areas too black and light areas near white... Most basic automatic digital (and old SLRs) cameras will aim for taking pictures as a 50 per cent grey panel, equalising the sum of all light into an averaged result. But most cameras offer you the possibility of changing this setting to a chosen density of picture... As well one can change the amount of pixilation of the picture... The most expensive cameras allow you to create your pictures in RAW which is the highest format recording of pixilation without any compression. There are many tricks one can use to take pictures in various light in order to modify the density of picture without having to change the settings.... Some professional digital cameras have resolutions of 56 megapixels as well as the added ability to shift the plate half a pixel in all directions thus if one desires, one can shoot four pictures of the same thing, feed the raw images into a computer and a special program will extrapolate an image with a gigapixel resolution only expected from spy satellite cameras...

Other technical manipulation of photography include filters... On most occasion, a sky is too bright... In the days of black and white, a yellow filter was used to bring back the sky value to the rest of the picture, thus often this filter turned skies into intense dark greys with bright clouds... When colour transparency was the rage, polarising filters had to be used to do a similar trick and intensify the sky... In movies, such filters cannot be used because of motion, thus a neutral "graded" filter is used. The filter is darker till about halfway from the top then quickly graded to full transparency from the middle onwards.  Our eyes have this great ability to adjust very quickly to the various intensity of light thus we don't this filtering, except some of us use polarised "sunnies" to limit the glare for reflection on objects. A simple trick I often use, in daylight with my cheap digital cameras, is too depress the trigger half-way while pointing at the sky, taking the light reading, then I lower the camera to the subject I wish to take, then take the picture using the flash to illuminate him or her... This works well on most occasion to balance the lighting, especially when the sun is blazing.... 

But apart from these basic technological manipulation, there are also manipulation of subjects in which one can give more importance to some part of the picture than other by moving about and choosing the angle from which the picture is taken... For example getting close to a soldier with a gun in a war zone will emphasise the idea of danger... Thus manipulation of the "emotion" of the picture will come from the proportion of background versus the amount of "foreground" or subject selected to illustrate... The status of the main subject is paramount, especially in photojournalism where a first strong impression is needed to convey a message... The choice of lenses from wide angle to telephoto also help in the manipulation of the image. When I was a photographer, I used a 100 to 110 millimetres focal length for serious portraits. One can use a 24 millimetre lens to make noses bigger and turn serious people into clowns...

Other manipulations of photography go back to even during Word war I, when photographers on the field did not record enough bangs on one plate... Thus by skilled tricks, they would marry two plates in one image giving a more dense impression of the soldiers action... Some of these tricky-dicky photographers even used pictures of tin soldiers in finely created sets mixed with their own images of exploding bombs or those of cigar smoke to increase the visual impact of war...

In movies, crude "special effects" were used soon after the beginning of the motion picture now to culminate in the total digitisation of modern films. 

In the sixties, the manipulation of coloured photographs was rife but it is quite complex, especially when using solvents... Using masks, special colours for transparencies, some of which were the size of an A4... Not a new dimension then, as such large plate photography had been used in war time to plot the next bombing raid... The larger the plate, the greater the definition of objects on the ground... These days, spy satellites can read your car number plate in 3D and in colour... The whole system though depends on the availability of memory and transmission of image... iPhones can be used to take a picture (movie or still) and at the click of the button the images are transferred to other recipients who can use it in whatever format to publish... Imagine the technology of the process that sends us picture perfect from Rover Curiosity on planet Mars...

But can we trust all images? Nupe... Can images lie? Of course, beyond "choosing" the moment of the image as explained earlier with the Merde-och Shitograph, images can be manipulated by addition and subtraction of bits... There is a current revolt against some magazines who publish "retouched" images of models and stars, conveying an illusion of perfect body beauty that is not.... Lucian Freud went the other way with his paintings, where the rawness of subject and choice of colour is emphasised to give a certain moody ugly beauty dichotomy effect. The use — and creation — of shadows and highlights is basic in photography and movie making. 
Most of us these days are happy to point and click... Snap shots and happy snappies...

Thus images, like the rest of our activities can influence our choices, subliminally, overtly or covertly depending on who is providing the image and on our state of mind at the time... If we are sad because of a death in the family, we might not see the fun in a funny image... Our leaders and their machine will use images to entice us, especially at election time... Image in themselves are inanimate object, even the moving ones, and only our knowledge, our prejudices and our moods will make the image part of our democratic ideal or not... This is why I am a cartoonist...
An image can tell a story like a thousand words can't... an image can tell a lie instantly. A lie that we might not be able to detect...
The amazing photographic technology of present day imaging has democratised the value of images, yet not all black cats are equal...

Gus leonisky.