Claim: ''UAP researcher'' released clear smoking gun photo of Orb captured by photographer

[Mick West]

So these appear to be the pixel coordinates of the center of the subject area (from top left) along with its width and height

So about here:

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

The Shard! Very nice, I just took one too:




View attachment 63479
View attachment 63480

Nice, but we're interested in the "wide" camera, not the ultra-wide.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

So about here:

View attachment 63482

So the camera would AF on this rectangle and ignore everything else? That's a low contrast area. Maybe not impossibly low contrast for the camera to handle.

And it would also take a spot meter reading from this rectangle? That doesn't seem to make sense, as the photo is properly exposed, but would be overexposed from a spot meter reading in that dark area of cloud shadow.

That would be a strange place to choose for a spot meter reading even for an ordinary landscape photo.

 

[Mendel]

So about here:

View attachment 63482

That's a 4:3 image.
The posted metadata says, 2268×4032 is the original format, which is 9:16.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

This might be un-cropped. Closest to it that I can find, anyway.

It's a 170KB JPEG. Low resolution...

It remains puzzling to me. Maybe it's just an off hand snapshot. But for a Pro to take something this poorly composed. It would hurt my teeth. Why vertical? Why that lens? I'd use the zoom telephoto and horizontal format. Play around with the zoom. Get rid of the clutter in the foreground.

And what about using the 3x power optical capability for a UFO photo? I just don't get it. If this were a naive non-photographer, I'd understand.

 

[Miss VocalCord]

This might be un-cropped. Closest to it that I can find, anyway.
View attachment 63483

And I think this image is the highest resolution of the object itself. (At least for pixels, not sure if it has any additional compression/changes)

 

[Mendel]

This might be un-cropped. Closest to it that I can find, anyway.
View attachment 63483
It's a 170KB JPEG. Low resolution...

But it's 720x1279, close to 9:16, and probably resized from the original.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

And I think this image is the highest resolution of the object itself. (At least for pixels, not sure if it has any additional compression/changes)

No, this is. Download and compare. This one is much less pixelated. We can see well defined borders between the scales on the wings.

 

[jarlrmai]

Looks like it was resized 3.15x down

2268/720 = 3.15
4032/1279 = 3.1524' etc

 

[Mendel]

It remains puzzling to me. Maybe it's just an off hand snapshot. But for a Pro to take something this poorly composed. It would hurt my teeth. Why vertical? Why that lens? I'd use the zoom telephoto and horizontal format. Play around with the zoom. Get rid of the clutter in the foreground.

But what about using the 3x power optical capability for a UFO photo? I just don't get it. If this were a naive non-photographer, I'd understand.

Here's what I think happened:
His car broke down. The panorama was nice, with the moving cloud shadows. He propped the phone up on the ground, maybe using a small tabletop stand, and took a sequence of pictures. One picture happened to catch the "orb".

 

[jarlrmai]

I took the same image with five differen focus point. Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Right, Bottom Left, and Center.

Orientation	top, left (0°)	top, left (0°)	top, left (0°)	top, left (0°)	top, left (0°)
Image resolution	72 x 72 dpi	72 x 72 dpi	72 x 72 dpi	72 x 72 dpi	72 x 72 dpi
Image size	4032 x 3024	4032 x 3024	4032 x 3024	4032 x 3024	4032 x 3024

Subject area for each

Subject Area

407 687 747 752

3431 705 747 752

800 2547 747 752

3440 2571 747 752

2063 1585 747 752

So these appear to be the pixel coordinates of the center of the subject area (from top left) along with its width and height

View attachment 63481

Any chance you can experiment with a vertical photo?

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Here's what I think happened:
His car broke down. The panorama was nice, with the moving cloud shadows. He propped the phone up on the ground, maybe using a small tabletop stand, and took a sequence of pictures. One picture happened to catch the "orb".

Maybe he was trying to take a selfie with the self-timer. Maybe that would explain the vertical photo. And the close focus... if that really was the way he set it.

I think selfie's are fatuous, but that's just me.

 

[jarlrmai]

If in portrait mode the x any y are swapped in the metadata then the focus area was around here?

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

That would be a pretty reasonable place to take a spot meter reading, if it averages over the entire square.

But is that the area you would choose if there were a 20 meter orb floating in front of you?

But the story is still confused as to how much time he had to see this orb then take a photo. Or was he about to take an ordinary landscape and then saw the orb?

And what about the 3 photo sequence? Did he take a photo before the Orb showed up? That argues that he was taking a landscape, the Orb showed up, he snapped that second photo, the Orb disappeared and he instinctively took another photo.

When he was taking the second photo he was holding the phone out in front of him and kind of saw the Orb, naked eye, at the same time. Just trying to make some sense.

In that scenario, he may have seen a passing butterfly in his peripheral vision, and it confused him. Maybe.

There was supposed to be a podcast recorded on Thursday, Oct 12. Maybe we'll hear the story. Maybe it will make some kind of sense.

 

[Mick West]

In portrait mode it's still relative to the same corner rotated.

That is, the first mumber is distance from the top, the second is distance from the left

so it seems to be here:

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

A washed out part of the sky? It seems to me that would underexpose the photo. And yeah, you could argue that it's a half stop underexposed. But this is digital, with so many things in between the camera original and my eye.

It's hard not to miss the purity of film.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Nice, but we're interested in the "wide" camera, not the ultra-wide.

My bad. I kept thinking "wide" as in wide angle. I can try again with the "normal wide", in portraiture mode with the F-stop at 1.5.

 

[John J.]

We can see well defined borders between the scales on the wings.

Being a bit pedantic- and not wanting to distract from the useful ongoing discussion by all posters regarding the properties of the photograph- but we're not seeing scales on the wings; the resolution is not sufficient.

From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_(insect_anatomy)

The individual "plates" in the photo above are scales.


Close-up of a Peacock butterfly wing:

The small, slightly square-ish appearance scales are perhaps most clearly seen individually as some of the lilac "dots" on the dark ovoid patch, or in the area of iridescent gold immediately above the ovoid patch.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Not pedantic. That needed to be corrected.

The "borders" I've been talking about are veins. The areas between the veins... don't seem to have a name.

Edit: Maybe they're called cells?

Angles, margins, cell and most characteristic veins of a butterfly wing. 1. Discal cell. 2. Discocellular vein complete. 3. Discocellular vein poorly developed. Sc = subcostal vein; R, R1, R2, R3, R4, R5 = radial veins; Rs = radial sector; M1 M2 M3 = medial veins; CuA, CuA1, CuA2 = anterior cubital veins; CuP = posterior cubital vein-vestigial in Papilionidae; 2A, 3A = anal veins; H = humeral vein; Sc+R1 = composite vein formed from the fusion of Sc and R1 of hindwing.

 

[Mendel]

When he was taking the second photo he was holding the phone out in front of him and kind of saw the Orb, naked eye, at the same time.

When I hold my phone out in front of me, I don't usually have blades of grass in the foreground.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

It's an embankment on the side of the road. How high is unknown. I would have climbed the embankment to get a cleaner landscape. But maybe he likes clutter in the foreground.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

We've been warned that there are many similar species. But Adelpha epinone looks pretty good.

The areas of white pigment are separated by the veins. Those distinct areas are what I've been incorrectly calling scales. The actual scales are much smaller. In the photo of Adelpha epinone, I see six white segments separated by veins on the forewing. I see no areas of white pigment on the hindwing.

I note that in the Orb photo I can see six white segments separated by dark bands on the left wing. The segmentation on the right wing is less distinct, but there. There's an area behind the white segments that is dark with no white segments. Is that not the hindwing?

The paper model in the middle-bottom is not situated quite right. The camera is a bit high. The model needs to be elevated a bit or the camera lowered. The model should be rotated a bit counter-clockwise when seen from above - the yaw. Without touching the separation between the wings, the whole model should be rolled so that the left wing is lower and the right wing higher- the roll. The pitch looks pretty good.

 

[Ann K]

It's an embankment on the side of the road. How high is unknown. I would have climbed the embankment to get a cleaner landscape. But maybe he likes clutter in the foreground.

Please, not "clutter". As an artist, I appreciate his inclusion of the foreground foliage to give depth to the scene. It's practically the only thing that makes me think the photographer knew what he was doing, compositionally. Cover it with your hand and you'll see how dull it would be if it just carried that shadowed blue down to the margin.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

So, you like clutter.

 

[Ann K]

Not pedantic. That needed to be corrected.

The "borders" I've been talking about are veins. The areas between the veins... don't seem to have a name.


View attachment 63492

I thought of them as "panes", but that doesn't seem to be the official name. However I found this interesting article:

A new study from Columbia Engineering and Harvard identified the critical physiological importance of suitable temperatures for butterfly wings to function properly, and discovered that the insects exquisitely regulate their wing temperatures through both structural and behavioral adaptations.

Contrary to common belief that butterfly wings consist primarily of lifeless membranes, the new study demonstrated that they contain a network of living cells whose function requires a constrained range of temperatures for optimal performance. Given their small thermal capacity, wings can overheat rapidly in the sun when butterflies cease flight, and they can cool down too much during flight in a cold environment. The study, published online today by Nature Communications, is the first to explore the implications of temperature in shaping the wing structure and behavior of butterflies.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-wings-butterflies.html

 

[Ann K]

So, you like clutter.

So, you like stark minimalism.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

The Mark Quisp method.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/cl...ured-by-photographer.13182/page-6#post-303585

I tried it on a JPEG SMPTE Color Bar. I kept it simple. I just increased the brightness in ACDSee.

Before

After

And I've found that it works. Look at all those reflections of the red and green bars in these highly reflective areas.

Can we agree that his method is invalid? He's just looking at artifacts he created himself.

 

[John J.]

As discussed at length elsewhere on this forum Mark Qvist,

The same person who did draw some circles over a vase

...has something of an ability to take information (e.g. a photo of a vase), find (or infer) qualities that seem -to some of us- superfluous and then make extraordinary claims based on those implied qualities.

First examined (as far as I know) by @NorCal Dave on this thread, Ancient Cultures... Advanced Manufacturing Capabilities
regarding Qvist's analysis of a vase, here https://unsigned.io/granite-artefact/ (there's no need for us to discuss it here IMHO).

I know almost nothing about photography, but based on the one example of Mr Qvist's analysis that's been discussed on Metabunk, maybe we should be cautious about any conclusions that he might make regarding the Ecuador "orb"
(while of course noting that his opinions are presented in good faith).

 

[deirdre]

It's an embankment on the side of the road. How high is unknown. I would have climbed the embankment to get a cleaner landscape. But maybe he likes clutter in the foreground.

maybe he was IN the car. his girlfriend driving to the nature preserve right down the road they were going to (lots of scenic amazon stuff on the tour) and he said Stop!" because the scene was pretty. because it is.

or he was leaving the nature preserve and he was actually across the road and took while seated in his car (because the scene was pretty, which it is).

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Too wet and too may bugs.

 

[jarlrmai]

It's an embankment on the side of the road. How high is unknown. I would have climbed the embankment to get a cleaner landscape. But maybe he likes clutter in the foreground.

In landscape photography it's called "foreground interest" a compositional technique to help with scale and draw the viewer's eye through the scene naturally.

Here it could be intentional or accidental.

 

[Miss VocalCord]

No, this is. Download and compare. This one is much less pixelated. We can see well defined borders between the scales on the wings.
View attachment 63485

But it has definitely undergone some manipulation (anti-aliasing?). The resolution of the object (about 230x260 pixels in your picture) is way to high to fit the original picture ( 2268×4032 ) since it would take up 10% of the width of the original.
So yes that object has a higher resolution, but is also probably blown up from the original and messed with. So I have the impression that the one I posted is 'closer' to the original.

Anyway, funny that what he wants to be

the most studied UFO photo in existence

still hasn't been released to the general public, however after reading some of the comments on reddit this seems his default behaviour.

 

[Mendel]

But it has definitely undergone some manipulation (anti-aliasing?). The resolution of the object (about 230x260 pixels in your picture) is way to high to fit the original picture ( 2268×4032 ) since it would take up 10% of the width of the original.
So yes that object has a higher resolution, but is also probably blown up from the original and messed with. So I have the impression that the one I posted is 'closer' to the original.

How wide do we expect the original to be? About 19-20 pixels? Do we have a version like that?

 

[Miss VocalCord]

How wide do we expect the original to be? About 19-20 pixels? Do we have a version like that?

In this version:

it is about 30 by 30 pixels, which seems about right to me.

 

[MyMatesBrainwashed]

In this version:

it is about 30 by 30 pixels, which seems about right to me.

The low resolution versions we have (that don't appear to be cropped) the thing is about 7x7.

We appear to have 2 different low resolution versions though.

Post 87 in this thread links to a 720 × 1279 pixels version of the image.

Post 150 links to a 676 x 1200 pixel version of the image that appears to have come from UAPMax.

They aren't exactly the same aspect. Resizing 676 to 720 gets a 720 x 1278. Resizing 720 to 676 get 676 x 1201.

Weird.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

What exactly is causing these artifacts to appear?

 

[jarlrmai]

The original JPEG has artifacts the repeated processing causes more rounding errors and recompression artifacts eventually the image "falls apart"

JPEGs are not bitmaps or raw data,

 

[FatPhil]

The original JPEG has artifacts the repeated processing causes more rounding errors and recompression artifacts eventually the image "falls apart"

JPEGs are not bitmaps or raw data,

You don't need repeated processing in order to bring these about, but it certainly helps.

The clue to the noise is clear when you see where it occurs most - near the text. In order to represent a hard edge, such as the strokes of text, you need high frequency components to be preserved, and that means the whole block will be awash with high frequency noise.

 

[jarlrmai]

You don't need repeated processing in order to bring these about, but it certainly helps.

The clue to the noise is clear when you see where it occurs most - near the text. In order to represent a hard edge, such as the strokes of text, you need high frequency components to be preserved, and that means the whole block will be awash with high frequency noise.

Yeah they are already there, but the processing bring out more macroblock artifacts, you are just not meant to edit JPEGs

 

[MyMatesBrainwashed]

Does anyone know what would cause all the weird sky artifacts that are in the low resolution images?

To help illustrate what I'm asking about, this is taken from the low resolution image and I've highlighted the portion I'm talking about...

... this is the same portion of sky from a crop of the analysis on UAPMax's website that doesn't contain the artifact...

... here's a resized and brightness/contrast played with to make the artifacts I'm talking about a bit more obvious...

The low resolution image'(s) sky are littered with these and I'm just wondering if anyone knows what would produce those artifacts assuming they aren't in the original?