Hingefactor
Member
Well done Mick West!
Ignoring the shadows, take a close look at 2 things. First, i find it interesting how the shade of the orange jumpsuit seems to look slightly different from one another. Maybe different times of the day? I assume they have hundreds of these gowns all being the same (Just a guess obviously). Second watch very closely in the video at the top and notice the amount of wind hitting each mans orange jump suit. Yes both have evidence of wind hitting them, but Haruna Yukawa (on the right) seems to have more powerful wind hitting him than Kenji Goto does. (Different videos? different time of the day?) These are very quick judgments I formulated from watching the video above. Zero credibility to what I just stated however its definitely something to think about.
What exactly looks "off" about these?
The man on the right is more troubling - I see what Mick was accomplishing with the multi image shot, but I have taken a thousand thousand group shots and never had shadows moving in opposite directions - it defies the laws of physics.
The thinner man is shot mostly straight on (and you can tell this by looking at his shoulders), while the heavier man is turned just slightly inwards toward the executioner (his left shoulder is just a tiny bit more prominent). What's odd about that is he would be turning TOWARD the light source rather than away and if there were a single source of light, his shadow would most definitely be moving towards camera right.
so you are saying these photos were taken indoors with a green screen too?Shadows move in the opposite direction of the light
so you are saying these photos were taken indoors with a green screen too?
what does that have to do with shadow angles?This was taken at high light with the sun directly over their heads - see the shadows in the eye sockets? They're around two stops darker. The two men were not shot with the sun directly overhead.
That shot was taken at high light... ...improved discussion.
Welcome, Deacon.
Professional expertise is always valuable.
As an amateur, I take thousands of shots a year in sunny situations like this video...
and your "not entirely real" comment certainly got my attention
(I did peruse your site...you tend to "focus" on stills--close-ups of people and products, indoors, in studio light, yes?)
I think your remarks about light and shadow deserve more weight than most of the unsubstantiated,
"That just don't look right!" we've seen...and yet--as one who has routinely seen profuse amounts of
diffused light from desert sand light up places that normally wouldn't be,
there's nothing about this that screams "obvious fake" to me.
Of course, when you said "not entirely real" that could of course mean that it's 99.9% real with the
most trivial of exceptions...including, one supposes, minor post-production work on accurate footage, yes?
I'm absolutely not invested in this particular thread: I don't think that the character of ISIS is
really in question or their willingness to do barbaric things...so even if they were--for some mysterious reason--
doing things in a studio to look like they were done outdoors...I don't think it would mean much...
But what do you think is the single strongest oddity that establishes this as being shot indoors?
p.s. The "it defies the laws of physics" comment also seemed strong to me, since I've often noted that actual
shadows didn't fall exactly where "common sense" told me to expect them...but we'll save that for another day...
I don't 'confuse' studio light with strobe light - light is light is light and the photons aren't aware of the difference. The sun is a huge nuclear ball millions of miles away, but a 7 foot parabolic umbrella or a big light bank positioned much closer has the exact same shadow pattern and can be made to look exactly like the sun if the photographer desires.
Well, you just officially exceeded my pay grade!THANK YOU! I had unfollowed the thread to avoid getting into a heated debate (which is of course one of the reasons I was hesitant to post in the first place), but am very glad I decided to pop in for one more peek. Your reply is incredibly thoughtful and balanced and I appreciate that.
These days I mostly shoot indoors (I'm assuming you probably saw http://deacontyler.com), but on the fashion page, it's a 60/40 split between indoor and outdoor shots. However one of my other sites is http://weddings.deacontyler.com, which is around 70% outdoors (I've since retired from wedding photography, as advertising is more profitable) and my old portrait webpage was around 95% outdoors.
That's the strangest part to me - I can't figure out WHY the video would be faked, doctored or soundstaged and didn't even realize that there was a debate on the matter until I watched a couple of videos for the first time today. So it wasn't the debate that made me question, it was viewing the videos with virgin eyes and extensive lighting experience that led me to the debate.
Then I spent some time trying to decide if they added in a bunch of post, additional lighting (and the battery power it would take to fill in or overpower the sun would be incredible) and it left me with even more questions, as why would production value need to be so high?
I reckon I could speculate and not come up with a satisfying answer.
As for the last question - The largest oddity is how the faces are lit. Lighting is never a mystery once you understand how it works. I used to teach lighting workshops to other photographers and I would always say "follow the shadows". What's odd about the lighting in the video that makes me wonder (keep in mind that nothing is conclusive) is how well the faces are lit without that much discomfort to the subjects - that alone makes it appear that the lighting, while bright, is not nearly as intense as the sun.
Were the sun directly overhead, their eyes would be in shadow - were the sun low in the sky and hitting their faces directly, they would have to squint terribly and the shadows would be flattened out. So I considered a large fill light behind the camera to brighten up the shadows on the faces from above and camera left and had to dismiss it. The sun wouldn't be hitting the fill light directly and there wouldn't be enough light to bring their faces up to ambient levels (reflected light always has diminishing returns!) There would however be enough light to make a huge shadow from the camera and tripod.
The very first video I watched was actually the Jordanian pilot - here's a frame from that video:
There is no mistaking that there are two light sources. The sun is behind the subjects and camera right and that's the brightest light in the scene, but if you look at the wrinkle above the man's right pectoral, there is a second light source lighting up that fold and subsequently, everyone's faces.
With the sun as the sole light source BEHIND the subjects, three things would happen: The first is that their faces would be in shadow and the second is a shift in color temperature (blue shadows).
So let's say they exposed for the shadows on the man's faces - what would happen is that the faces would be properly exposed, but then the background would be VERY overexposed and the colors would not look at 'rich' as they do. They would also have to manually set their cameras for around 8000K to compensate for the blue shadows, which would make that overexposed background look extremely orange, rather than the more neutral color it is (and yes, it's still orange, but it would look much nastier).
The third thing that would happen if there was a single source of light behind the prisoner and the men (even imagining that they fixed all of the color temperature disparages and exposure problems) would be that their clothing would look flat and featureless. The shadows on his pants would flatten out as well.
There were quite a few other 'oddities' I noticed in the burning video that I won't go into for the sake of getting back to work and not opening a new debate (although I will link this website, which explains that the fire is clearly fake: http://www.thomaswictor.com/the-jordanian-pilot-was-not-burned-alive/). I'll skip my own commentary about exposing for fire (which is EXTREMELY bright) without leaving the background underexposed by four stops and how shooting through flames will create heat shimmers and let the reader decide for his or her ownself.
Once more, I'm not saying that the victims are actors - that is not quantified and it's disrespectful to their families, but it's curious that they're lighting and editing the scenes like a movie!
But you are saying the Jordanian pilot's execution wasn't real, and you don't find that disrespectful to his suffering or his relatives?Once more, I'm not saying that the victims are actors - that is not quantified and it's disrespectful to their families, but it's curious that they're lighting and editing the scenes like a movie!
I do not see how this debunks the stated claim that the video is false.
Why don't you debunk the claim by putting two people spaced ~3 feet apart (angled any way you would like) and see if you can duplicate the effect of the shadows on the men's faces? In other words, EXACTLY duplicate the shot.
Mick, I have scanned through the comment string looking for any mention of evidence of blood present at the scene and nothing insofar as I can tell has confirmed that an execution has even occurred in the video. I could not find any mention of this issue.
Because that's not the issue. The issue here is the claim that the shadows were wrong in the video with the two hostages. It was not a video of an execution.
We try to focus on a single claim of evidence per thread here. Please see:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/posting-guidelines.2064/
I made the similar error on my first couple of posting attempts, but once you get into the site mindset, one claim per topic and the the like it soon becomes easy.My sincerest apologies. That was a gaffe on my part for not paying attention to the subject header and using poor judgement. Not the best first impression I understand. Yikes! But in all honesty, I apologize for that erroneous error.
This is one video that I wish were fake.
The sunlight comes from the sun. The sun is calculated as a infinite point of light, then the shadows should be parallel. But them converged in one point. it's a spotlight.
Try yourself, on a cloudy day out with a pencil, and try to project the shadow on the ground. You will not see much than a blurred shadow.
Shadows cast by a point source not at effectively infinite distance will diverge, not converge.
And any convergence, correct me if I'm wrong, is merely the visual effect of foreshortening. No?