Mary’s Monday Metazoan: It’s a bir…oh, HEY!
I sympathize. There you are, a homely brown speckled bird, and someone finally bothers to take a picture of you, and what happens? Some showoff steals the whole show.
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
congenital cynic:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:38 am
That’s got to be one of the best photobombs ever.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:39 am
1) Water around the whale is undisturbed.
2) The bird and whale are the same apparent size, and both are in focus despite the distance between them.
3) There’s a shadow of something in the lower-right, yet no shadows under the bird.
5) Image: FotoForensics – JPEG Error Level Analysis (suggesting the whale had been through more rounds of jpeg-saving than the bird)
6) Neither animal seems to match the scale of the terrain, assuming that’s a dirty/snowy/grassy field that meets the water, viewed from somewhere elevated.
congenital cynic:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:47 am
Agree that it is likely a fake, but I don’t think that’s water around the whale. Looks like the decking on a boat (note handrail to left of bird) and the whale is just poking up above the edge of the boat. If that’s supposed to be water, then the person who fabbed the photo wasn’t careful enough to get rid of that rail.
ballookey:
January 28th, 2013 at 10:32 am
Shadows and scale don’t bother me – photos can be weird that way.
But the lack of splash or water runoff from the whale does bother me. Also, it SEEMS like this is pretty close to the shore and although I can’t know the depth of the water, it seems unlikely that a whale would be breeching like that in the shallows.
The lack of spray or splash, or water flying off the whale in any way though, that makes it very suspect.
ballookey:
January 28th, 2013 at 1:02 pm
Two more thoughts:
The shadow that Sky Captain is talking about is actually a wooden hand railing or something cutting across the lower right corner. It’s not a sharp shadow that would be suspect in a scene with diffuse light, but rather an object mistaken for a shadow.
Also, I respectfully disagree with the interpretation of the fotoForensics result. There are less artifacts in the whale, but not none, and in fact the whale is far less detailed than the bird, so that would be the expected result if the image were real. In reading the site’s guide to analysis, this is to be expected. In fact the image as a whole displays little evidence of tampering other than the fact that it has been resaved as a JPG more than once.
If this is a fake, then the photographer possibly captured both images on the same day, and merged them without applying a disproportionate amount of processing to either image. Same camera, same day, same post processing and a resave explains what we see. Or the image is genuine and it’s just hard to parse what’s going on in the middle distance.
danborkowski:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:05 pm
It’s only a model.
Lofty:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:32 pm
Whale? Silly people. That’s just Russia’s newest camouflaged stealth submarine after the captain’s night on the good stuff.
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 28th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
That totally looks photoshopped.
OTOH I have a picture that totally looks photoshopped and I know I actually took it, so…
Jadehawk:
January 28th, 2013 at 5:03 pm
could also be a statue
chrislawson:
January 28th, 2013 at 7:41 pm
Gotta be careful of the over-analysis. I’ve seen perfectly genuine photos picked apart and “proven” fake by enthusiastic online debunkers.
ballookey:
January 29th, 2013 at 9:40 am
Google “breaching whale” images and tell me that looks believable in any way. There should be a whole mess of spray and splashing but there’s none, zero, in this photo.
The statue theory seems plausible.