A Picture Worth 547 Words
At the front of each National Geographic magazine, there is a section called ‘Your Shot.’ There, readers can submit their own photographs, on any subject, and the best ones get published each month. Some of the photos are simply brilliant.
And some have turned out to be simply fake. This month’s National Geographic revealed that an image they ran in an earlier issue was a Photoshop job. I remember seeing it, when it first came out – it’s a photo of a shaggy dog against a blue sky filled with jets on a formation flyby.
I remember seeing that image. Seeing it, and thinking, “Wow, that must have been some camera, to have captured fast-moving jet aircraft in such detail while keeping the image of the dog so clear and focused.”
Turns out, of course, that readers a lot more knowledgeable than I realized there was no way even a high-end camera could have pulled that shot off. The editors at National Geographic confronted the submitter, and sadly, he confessed to ‘shopping the image.
It’s still a great image. Whether it’s ‘true’ or not is something for philosophers and the photo editors at NatGeo to debate. I really don’t care.
Heck, I don’t own Photoshop, but even with my poor man’s Corel Paint Pro I can do some pretty amazing things to photos. I could easily put myself on the Moon, or remove some of the grey from my hair, or create a fairly convincing UFO image. It’s easy to do, even with a modest PC and some relatively cheap software.
So I don’t trust photos implicitly, anymore. I’ve seen hundreds of ‘ghost’ photos that even I could spot as obvious fakes. Ditto for UFOs, Bigfeet, chupacabras, and of course Offal, the legendary Sardis Lake Monster. I’ve also seen some photos that were not obvious fakes, which raised the interesting prospect that they might be genuine.
But the only way to know is to take the photo yourself. Sadly, I have few encounters with Yeti or the walking dead, and thus my folder of paranormal photographs is nearly empty.
But not entirely empty. There is one photo, and while I can’t tell you what it depicts, or why it looks the way it does, I can tell you it is genuine.
It was taken at the so-called Montana Vortex in September of 2007 with a modest digital point-and-shoot camera. The images immediately before and after it were normal depictions of people and trees and sky. It was taken in wooded setting with moderate sunlight.
What the heck is it? No idea. Probably a camera malfunction. But you decide.
If you discover dire portents or harbingers of doom hidden somewhere in the pixels, please don’t hesitate to not tell me. Seriously. I don’t want to know. But if you look at it and go ‘Hey, that’s just a polar distortion of the secondary optical sensor membrane,’ then let me know.
