Bizarre digital photo - how did this happen?

<p>Hi! I would really appreciate some help on this one because I can't explain it.<br>

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=313156&l=cc740d7570&id=100000126087599<br>

<br />A co-worker of mine took this photo in front of Air Force Two when the VP came to visit Allentown, PA. This is me with the Secret Service Agent in front of the plane. If you look at our legs, the paint on the ground appears to go THROUGH our legs. Now keep in mind this was taken with a Samsung Digimax camera, so it's digital - not film. My friend Blake noticed it at first when I posted it on Facebook. I am sure anyone who is looking at that photo is thinking it is photoshopped but it isn't.<br>

So what is the explanation? I am not a camera person at all, so you may have to speak slow and use small words. :)</p>

<p>Many thanks,<br>

Bill</p>

<p>This is directly related to what I do for a living (P&S camera firmware), and I have a few theories, but without having the original full resolution JPG straight out of the camera I can't really verify any of them. I have to say that all of them would be pretty unlikely. There's all sorts of masks and processing that happens in P&S cameras, masks can get shifted due to SW bugs, and sometimes a mask can be accidentally re-used from a previous capture. Generally these things are extremely rare in a production camera. </p>

<p>If the camera was on a tripod and the previous shot was taken, some of these become more likely (just like they would with film). However, if it was a hand-held shot, any information accidentally affecting the next frame would be unlikely to be aligned perfectly like that</p>

<p>If you look at the red car, it almost seems like there's a shadow of something that is not in the scene, right next to the guy's leg. This could easily be part of the same corruption. </p>

<p>Any chance we can get the original JPEG linked to?</p>

<p>The picture on Facebook was taken directly from the camera and loaded onto my computer and then ultimately uploaded to Facebook. There was certainly no tripod used and no fancy settings that were chosen. A group of us went out to the pad after VP Biden left, snapped off some shots, and then left. <br>

I'm not seeing the false shadow... Hmmm. I'll try to upload the picture here.</p><div></div>

<p>Unfortunately Facebook scaled your image to 720x540 and resaved it without most of the Exif data. If there's some way to get the original file on Facebook, I do not know. </p>

<p>Very interesting. I wonder if the phenomenon could be replicated with lines in a parking lot. Do you have access to the camera?</p>

<p> </p>

<p>My first thought was a reflection / flare issue, but I've never seen one continue a pattern like that...</p>

<p>My other thought is that it is trick of the eyes, but it is definitely on the image file...</p>

<p>Got to be something in the way the camera is processing the image...</p>

<p>Dave</p>

 

<p>[[Got to be something in the way the camera is processing the image...]]</p>

<p>Algorithms Gone Wild!</p>

 

<p>My wife has done -something- to it. I need to poke it to get it to work again. What is strange is that the line in the cement (running roughly perpendicular to the yellow/black painted lines) don't go through our legs, so I am fairly certain we were corporeal at the time. :) But with that said, why are we transparent for one line and not the other?<br>

Other things to note: It was a very bright day and the picture was taken in the direction of the sun. Could it be a contrast thing? The fact that the line is so dark compared to the cement?</p>

I was thinking double exposure, but the Digimax 301 does not appears sophisticated enough to support this.

<p>Maybe the jet landed on a NFL field?</p>

<p>I brought your image into Photoshop and increased the light levels - as you can see- rather significantly.<br>

Interestingly, the lines the only lines that don't get blown out by are those on the pants.<br>

And I'm not exactly sure what this means.</p>

<p>Ray</p><div></div>

I got the original file from the poster and studied it pretty meticulously. I am baffled, and so are a few of my

co-workers. There are some things that might or might not be irregularities in the image (the grey plane in

the background has a strange pattern on its wing, etc.), but nothing conclusive from such a low resolution

image.

 

It might be a one in a billion coincidence (there's an internal reflection that just happened to focus and line

up perfectly over your pants), or more likely it's some software bug either combining a small part of the

previous exposure with this one or even more likely, shifting over a part of this one over itself (mask

ghosting of sorts). This still requires a huge coincidence of it lining up to look that perfect, but barring some

secret service invisibility cloak, I have no other explanations.

 

Do you have any other shots from the same camera/same location?

<p>Thanks, folks. Feel free to forward this to any of your guru friends. I'm stumped and my OCD is kicking in, making it difficult for me to think about much else besides my disappearing legs.<br>

Yuriy, I've sent you every picture taken at that time. You can see the Secret Service agent I'm shaking hands with in one of the other shots. But as I mentioned before, I can't seem to find the same anomaly anywhere else.<br>

Raymond, nice manipulation call! I have no idea what that means either but it is interesting that only the legs show the stripes.</p>

<p>Looks to me (as a wikd guess and in the complete absence of any expertise) that it is an artefact of some heavy noise reduction processing. If the function of noise reduction is to spot the pixels that are a suspiciously different colour to those around them then it looks like the software is still guessing where it ought not. Still - very strange.</p>

<p>It seems that there was VLF (very low frequency) radio radiation in the immediate area. This type of radiation, provided all parameters are in order, can make solid objects appear transparent to electronic sensors. Similar to but not the same as X-Rays and Magnetic Resonance Imaging.</p>

<p>Being that AF2 was on hand I doubt that this phenomenon was not the case provided the image shown is authentic.</p>

<p>Most intriguing.....I have never seen anything like that......so, unless your co-worker had a chance to manipulate it, then I can offer no suggestions at all. Which, in itself is quite unusual.....regards, Robert</p>

<p>What did the photos taken immediately before and immediately after this one look like? Anything strange about them? Did any of them also include that line. Have you reported this to Mulder and Scully? Was The Smoking Man anywhere nearby?</p>

<p>;-)</p>

<p>Tom M.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>George, if VLF makes solid objects appear translucent as you say, then why do only the human bodies and their clothing take on this translucency?</p>

<p>Diffraction. High light level and aperture created by legs.</p>

<p>This has happened to me when I do photomontages and the background picture has a reflectivive surface.<br>

I know this was not your case.<br>

RAFAEL E GONZALEZ CPA </p>

<p>Are you sure you and your plane weren't in Area 53?</p>

<p>I hope you aren't trying to "fix" the camera! you could auction that off as an xray camera and make a killing!</p>

 

<p>Something must be way out of alignment on that camera. The shadow on the runway somehow sprouted a T-tail, which that C-40B does not have. Equally strange is how the camera missed the shadow of the winglets. Super weird.</p>

<p>This is why I don't trust P&S cameras anymore.</p>

<p>The only way to account for all the discrepancies pointed out above was that a beta version of Adobe's new auto-fill effect must have been installed on the camera's on-board computer.</p>

<p>Ha! You say this will never happen ... wait 5 years and see. Once they iron out (pun intended) minor glitches like transparent legs, the P&S crowd will love menu choices like "remove power lines", "remove uncle Bob", etc. Obviously, this release was testing the "remove foreground subjects" mode and only got partway through the job.</p>

<p>:-)</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>PS - Seriously, tho, anybody else notice the lack of deep blacks in the image. Initially, I thought this was just due to a dirty lens, but the light overall fog doesn't seem to have the characteristics of a dirty lens (eg, concentrated around highlights). This may be telling us something like two images were mindlessly (or erroneously ) superimposed. Also, this image apparently went through Facebook -- could it be that something happened to it there?</p>