Thursday, April 30, 2009

Is this for real?

© By Othmar Vohringer


This image is making the rounds on the Internet for quite some time now. It was only a matter of time until it would end up in my email inbox. Yesterday someone sent me this picture titled: Best bowkill on camera. But is it real or is the image made up in photoshop or some other photo-manipulating program?

Whenever I cam across this image on the Internet I discovered that it unleashed a hot discussion of real versus fake. Lucky me I am married to a photographer and graphic design artist. My wife knows a thing or two about manipulating images so I asked her to take a look at it.

Here verdict after close examination. This image is one hundred percent fake.

The buck looks dead as in laying on the ground and then has been cut out and placed into a background that might be taken my a game cam. Notice the pile of corn at the bottom right corner of the image.
The blood splatters have been painted in. I had no clue but I am told by my wife that photo draw programs come with a variety of “brushes” that let you paint anything from a house to a tree and mountain, or in this case, blood into an image.

Knowing an animal’s anatomy I paid close attention to the muscles. If a buck jumps up in the air, as this one appears to be doing, you wpuld see the hind leg muscles bulging from the strain and force needed to leap that high. But I can’t see any muscle strain. In fact all the muscles are relaxed as they would appear on a dead deer.

There seems to be also something wrong with the buck’s eyes. Usually the color of the eye is black when you take a picture of a life deer but will reproduce white on a dead deer. These eyes are white.

Then there are the other factors to consider. When a deer jumps up like that it happens very fast so fast in fact that the camera cannot capture the movement without blur unless the photographer uses what’s called a fast lens with a wide aperture and the camera is set at around 800 to 1000 ISO. No game camera is capable of "freezing" fast movement not even with a flash.

With all these observations and my wife’s professional opinion I came to the conclusion that this image is as fake as a water turtle in the Sahara.

What’s your take on it?


Othmar Vohringer Outdoors
Founding Member of Outdoor Bloggers Summit

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw this one awhile back and I still think it is FAKE.

Caleb Pearce said...

I have never seen this before, but it is definitely fake if you look at the edges of the deer you can see where the person that cut it out wiggled wile cutting.

Othmar Vohringer said...

From the first day I have seen that image on the Internet two years ago I could smell that something is not right. Then when it was sent to me and I showed it to my wife she removed all doubt with a simple sentence. “It’s fake honey.”

-ov-

Othmar Vohringer OutdoorsFounding Member of Outdoor Bloggers Summit

Deer Tracking Cameras said...

Real or not, it's a pretty cool picture. Makes you wonder...

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