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I Saw And Photographed The Loch Ness Monster In 2006

Apologies for the delay. Without further ado:-

I write only of the image in isolation and cannot speak of the atmosphere the original poster has mentioned, nor what took place in the moments after this picture was taken. I cast no aspersions on the motives or judgment of the original poster, to whom I am grateful for posting his experience here.

a) The sketch you have seen is a good one in terms of composition. One thing it cannot convey is that the scene is rather a gloomy one: it's really rather overcast with comparatively bright sunlight coming in from the left, making both the sky and the water notably brighter on the left of the shot than the right. There is a faint reflection of the mobile phone being used to take the photograph -- and curiously it seems to have what I first thought of as a large 'eye' sticker on the body, but now I see that it must be a separate body as it is seen beyond the edge of the device. Am not sure about this.

b) If anything, the sketch slightly underestimates the length of the 'creature'. If the implied shape (it appears mostly as submerged shadow) is all 'creature', it extends all the way from the centre of the shot to the extreme right of the frame. That said, the adjective 'huge' gives a mistaken impression in my view. Especially relative to the surrounding scenery, it is 'long' and not really of preposterous/'monstrous' proportions.

c) The 'creature's' back breaks the surface of the water in five, possibly six places, with the raised ridges we have come to think of when Nessie is mentioned. They appear 'bumpy', but the photograph is blurred, especially so around the 'creature' - of which more shortly.

d) The 'head' of the 'creature' is very low and flat - as if craning forward. A charitable interpretation might be that it is serpentine and the sides of the head are those hood-like flaps that some snakes possess.

e) If presented with this image and no supporting account or location, I would have one judgment - indeed, I tried it on a third-party and they made the same guess: it's a large bird, either a swan or goose, in the process of taking off or (more likely) landing. The sides of the 'head' that I described above are the wings in a lowered position, and the long front of the head is a fully-extended bird's neck. The blur around the 'creature' is owing to a combination of a) distance from camera and b) speed, and the 'bumps' protruding from the water are where its legs or lower body have made contact with the water while coming down. Some might object that the size is too great for a bird at this distance, but I think it has been elongated by the blur of movement.

The implied shape beneath the surface comes from darkness, which is formed by the disruption on the water breaking the reflection of sunlight that exists elsewhere; although - I concede - the bumps are surprisingly (but not impossibly) regular. We need an ornithologist on this one to judge how consistent with landing patterns it is. Perhaps tellingly, the resulting wake is slightly wider at the right of the photograph than at the 'head' end, as the ripples/waves have had a second or two more of radiation from their points of impact. Similarly, the impact points ('ridges') are darker to the left than those on the right as they have been created more recently.

I don't rule out the possibility that this is another creature or object that by fluke appears to resemble a bird in the process of landing - nor that I may be wrong - but this is what I personally made of the picture. I once experienced an aural 'hallucination' that has opened me to the possibilities of light/sound + human brain and animal instinct resulting in weird perceptions which are - nonetheless - naturally generated.

I hope this helps.
 
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Mythopoeika said:
This report from 2015 says otherwise....
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With respect, it says so only inasmuch as by reference to the (barely) continued existence of the last-ever circus elephant in the UK.

My point was that although there is a persuasive morphological similarity between aquatic elephants and some grouped instances of Nessie shots, this cannot represent a contemporary (or post-1980s) explanation for such sightings.

There was an implication being made (I felt, perhaps wrongly?) that this was, somehow, being considered a viable interpretation for some of the pictures/witness statements over the last 35 years.
 
I've just been sent a video of a swan taking off from water and another of one landing.

I'm now fairly sure that if a swan is responsible for this picture, it would be one taking off, not landing - far more drawn out with multiple surface contacts.
 
Yithian said:
e) If presented with this image and no supporting account or location, I would have one judgment - indeed, I tried it on a third-party and they made the same guess: it's a large bird, either a swan or goose, in the process of taking off or (more likely) landing. The sides of the 'head' that I described above are the wings in a lowered position, and the long front of the head is a fully-extended bird's neck. The blur around the 'creature' is owing to a combination of a) distance from camera and b) speed, and the 'bumps' protruding from the water are where its legs or lower body have made contact with the water while coming down. Some might object that the size is too great for a bird at this distance, but I think it has been elongated by the blur of movement.
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Interestingly, "bird taking off" was my impression from the drawing.
 
Surely though Mr Case and his then-girlfriend couldn't mistake a large water bird for a "monster"?
 
The photo, yes. But when they saw the thing in the water surely it would have been obvious if it was a bird? Let's look at Mr Case's description on page 1 of this thread:

"I can't really judge size on water, its not my specialty, but it was HUGE. It looked like a whale. I would say it was gray like an elephant with a neck that was swinging side to side over the water. That was really what it looked like, an elephant waving its trunk. There was a huge commotion in the water behind it. The thing was just massive. It was swimming back toward Inverness the way we came."

So the photo may look like a bird (swan?) but Mr Case's description doesn't seem to be of a particularly bird-like creature. :)
 
Excellent analysis, Yithian.
Loch Ness is home to several species of large aquatic birds including geese, swans, muscovy ducks and even pelicans. From your description, a line of them running on water as they do at take-off or landing, sounds very plausible.

Also, to Ermintrude, I did not intend to suggest that elephants swimming in the Loch could account for recent sightings but, as the BBC report states, this could well explain earlier sightings both here and elsewhere, which have all added to the accumulated mythos. In particular, the similarities between the Mawgawr pics and a bathing elephant are remarkable:

magawr.jpg


Mawgawr.jpg
 
silverity said:
The object in the picture is uniformly dark and swans are white. Given the sun was behind the photographer, I would not expect a white swan to turn out black.
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Unless it was a black swan or a brown/grey goose.
silverity said:
I also note an absence of anything I would call wings in the picture.
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If the camera was on auto and it was a gloomy day as described, then the camera might select a slower shutter speed causing motion blur? Yithian mentions wings.
silverity said:
Based on the thousands of photos of Loch Ness I have looked at over the past 7 years, I would say that object is larger than a bird, but as I said I will confirm that when I take comparison shots in March at the loch.
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You've seen it and I haven't and having read your blog for some time now I respect your judgement on these matters.

@Justin Case - compelling account, thanks for posting it.
 
silverity said:
I am pretty sure that is not a swan. The object in the picture is uniformly dark and swans are white. Given the sun was behind the photographer, I would not expect a white swan to turn out black.
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Yes, you would think a swan would turn out pretty obvious in a photo, even if it is a bit motion blurred. Cormorants are regulars at Loch Ness however.
 
Coastaljames said:
I'm genuinely not being dismissive at all. I was rather suggesting what the photo would probably show if the drawing was accurate.
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Yes, in retrospect, I think if anyone was being hasty it was me - apologies for reading too much into what you were saying.

Coastaljames said:
I didn't assert anything like that at all. I clearly stated that this particular photo could (like hundreds of others) show the Loch Ness Monster. And that it could show an almost infinite (ok, maybe that's a little much but still...) amount of other things.
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For sure, and I think I was trying to argue that we cannot as yet be certain that one or more of those other things is not actually whatever is giving rise to the sightings; i.e. that it or they is or are, in fact, "the monster". But the more I think about it, the more I realise it is not much more than semantics/pedantics, and I doubt the point is worth labouring much further.
 
silverity said:
I am pretty sure that is not a swan. The object in the picture is uniformly dark and swans are white. Given the sun was behind the photographer, I would not expect a white swan to turn out black. I also note an absence of anything I would call wings in the picture. Based on the thousands of photos of Loch Ness I have looked at over the past 7 years, I would say that object is larger than a bird, but as I said I will confirm that when I take comparison shots in March at the loch.
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1) I am in no way wedded to the bird being a swan - any similarly-sized species of whatever shade will do.
2) The sun does not appear to be behind the photographer, but to his left.
3) The reflection of the sun off the water will do any number of things to an object depending on precise movements and positions.
4) The image is 514 x 359 and a puny 336kb: a) this is not the image from the phone but a degraded copy, b) the colours we are seeing are pretty rough approximations of the original scene. The range of colours on display is very limited and adjacent objects have taken on near-uniform shades.
5) The 'creature' itself is the most distorted area of a low-fidelity picture; accordingly, I've tried to make a judgment based on the totality of elements and not just one.
6) There are non-white swans; in fact the only living example I've seen of a black swan was in Scotland - although I make no claim that that is what is depicted in this image.

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Addendum: having just compared the sketch to the image again, I find the curved neck of the former is highly misleading - the top part of the 'head' (neck and head if avian) is wholly flat in the photograph. The sketch looks like a classic Nessie/plesiosaur head, the photograph does not.
 
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At absolutely no point did I say this was a camera phone. I stated very clearly that the camera was a cheap point and click that was already a number of years old at that point.

If even that simple fact is misread in my report, what else isn't translating?

There aren't humps behind the object. It's a wake.

I am really angry that I was assured my photo would not be saved or shared by the two individuals who I trusted with it. It was saved by both and shared by one. I also asked to please have the opportunity to read the assessnents before they were shared. Those promises were also ignored.
 
My mistake, I thought the reflection was of a camera phone. Are you trying to say that your 'cheap point-and-click camera took photographs of 336kb? Or that you subsequently scanned a physical print at this resolution? If it is a 'conventional' camera, it is being held the wrong way to generate this image. Have you cropped or rotated it?

I have saved nothing and shared nothing - the image was (in fact, still is) on my screen in my browser from this morning. I have just read back our conversation and you did not ask for my assessment before it was shared; your memory is at fault.

I do not break promises. If you would like, I would be happy to post the entire content of our conversation thread here so that there can be no misunderstanding. Please let me know if this is necessary.

Edit: I see you have removed the image from the link.
 
I am incorrect about asking you withhold assessment. I asked Silverity and thought I had asked you. I would still have hoped you would show me the courtesy of at least informing me that you were making a public assessment.

As I explained to Silverity, I did not take or upload the photo. She did both. She plugged the camera into the Dell with a FireWire. There was a software program that opened and she selected the files to be uploaded, then she dragged the monster shot out of the picture photo remarking she was t going to look st it again. She dropped it into a random folder that I discovered eleven years later was an MP3 collection.

I do not what settings were used for upload or photography. The image was not manipulated or cropped that I ever saw. And I don't know what you mean about how she was holding the camera based on the reflection. I wasn't paying attention to her but to the object which did not fly away but rather sank.
 
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Justin Case said:
I do not what settings were used for upload or photography. The image was not manipulated or cropped that I ever saw. And I don't know what you mean about how she was holding the camera based on the reflection. I wasn't paying attention to her but to the object which did not fly away but rather sank.
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The camera reflection shows it being held vertically (turned ninety degrees from standard use - which is why I mistook it for a camera), which would generate a 'portrait' image (taller than wide); this image is a 'landscape' image (wider than tall).

In our conversation I wrote the following:

My intention was to describe the image and comment on any respects in which my impression differs from your description. If there is any potential explanations that I can think of, I will add them. [sic - typo 'n all]

I'm sorry that you feel this did not adequately convey my intention.
 
silverity said:
Cormorants are darker, but the "body" in the picture looks larger in proportion to the "neck" than for cormorants which have quite big necks/heads. Besides, I again think this object is further out than that. There is a line below the object which is most likely a boat wake, so we are out there with the boats. If you have eyes on photo, multiply the length of that object by ten to scale up to a 30ft cruise boat (if it was a bird). There is no way a 30ft boat would occupy that space on the photo.
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Ah well of course you have the better of me having seen the actual photo!
 
Justin Case said:
I am incorrect about asking you withhold assessment. I asked Silverity and thought I had asked you. I would still have hoped you would show me the courtesy of at least informing me that you were making a public assessment.

As I explained to Silverity, I did not take or upload the photo. She did both. She plugged the camera into the Dell with a FireWire. There was a software program that opened and she selected the files to be uploaded, then she dragged the monster shot out of the picture photo remarking she was t going to look st it again. She dropped it into a random folder that I discovered eleven years later was an MP3 collection.

I do not what settings were used for upload or photography. The image was not manipulated or cropped that I ever saw. And I don't know what you mean about how she was holding the camera based on the reflection. I wasn't paying attention to her but to the object which did not fly away but rather sank.
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My apologies for posting too much here. I have now deleted the content of my posts.
 
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