Choose and perish!

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1419539]

Comments

[heyokish.livejournal.com]

also, mind-blowingly uglified.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Cannot vote: need higher resolution image.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

But for varying values of "real". ;)

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Reality is asymptotic

[miramon.livejournal.com]

Or possibly, judging from the appearance of the clouds on the horizon, taken on a planet with a diameter much less than Earth

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I usually find that the best thing to do with these is to retain the services of somebody who has, perhaps, seen one or two 'shops in their time, and ask if they wouldn't mind taking a close look at the pixels.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Guessing "real" because my first impulse was to write it off as fake and I always distrust that impulse... then I realised that it could have been taken with a digital SLR and a telephoto lens (there's plenty of light, so a fast exposure would still be possible) and upon looking closer I didn't see any obvious clone-marks.

-- Steve could definitely be wrong on this, as he's no expert.

[drplokta]

The dynamic range is too wide for a single shot, and I'd consider an HDR composite to be a fake in this context. But the clouds on the horizon are also extremely dodgy-looking.

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what's at issue here. It's still a real, actual picture, regardless of whether it was created with Photoshop, or the traditional way.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Fake on two counts.

Firstly, and most obviously to me, the sky doesn't match the horizon. The white cumulus in the background is missing its bottom, so the sea has clearly been pasted in front. The scale of the clouds relative to the land is also wrong, and there are no shadows from the clouds or reflections of them in the sea.

Secondly, the depth of field between the seagull and the background is impossible. You'd need a practically pinhole aperture to achieve that, at which point the fastest sensor/film in the world couldn't let you get down to the ~1ms exposure needed to catch the bird without motion blur like that.

So it's a composite of at least three images: the sky, the land, and the seagull.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

This is one of those "count the problems" tests, isn't it?

If not, they really should use this in tourist publicity: "Come to Shoopton, where the sun always shines ... from several directions at once!"

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

It's a Herring Gull.

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

I'm presuming its a HDR shot. With the Herring gull's movement I'd say off a custom firmware on a Cannon camera.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally,to "gull" someone is to fool them.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Doesn't sit with me. Not so much for the gull itself, though there are some dodgy bits, but the clouds. And honestly, if you're going to paste in a sky wouldn't you choose a prettier one?

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

also, hasn't anyone ID'd the town yet? Can't be too hard, white cliffs so south coast, plus a sea arch.. if it turns out to be in the Bahamas it's definitely fake cos you don't get Herring Gulls in the bahamas.