• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Miscellaneous Ghost Photos & Videos

It's that thing that terrorised Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror...

maxresdefault.jpg
 
If you look closely at the phantom figure in the Church Cove photo, it's a "head shot" that's clearly truncated on the left-hand side so as to look like a cropped snapshot or a bust.

In other words, it looks like an image of an incomplete / cropped image. This leads me to suspect it's some sort of imagery artifact rather than part of the scene's actual content.
 
If you invert the image and zoom in (though you can see it in the photo anyway really) you can see a line of a suspiciously consistent colour, of a suspiciously uniform width, tracing the edge of his shoulder just where the face is. If I'd tried to photoshop a face in there I'd have probably have made a mess of the edge of the shoulder and wanted to tidy it up a bit.
Being in lock down is a great opportunity to hone your photoshop skills innit.

(I try not to be too cynical but I have rather come down to the idea that if people see ghosts, they're not the sorts of things that cameras can capture.)
 
This really did keep me from getting any sleep last night. Well, it's 2:51am and I am a long way from going to bed yet/now. lol

 
AnonyJoolz said:
A new one from Cornwall!

From the website of the local paper https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/ghostly-figure-photobombs-couples-church-4141130

"A couple have been left spooked after spotting a ghostly apparition lurking in the background of their selfie taken near a medieval church in Cornwall.

Craig Thomas, 35, took the picture earlier today with his partner Holly Leech, 27, during their daily exercise, after lockdown restrictions in the UK were eased earlier this week.

But it wasn't until they returned home, that they spotted a ghostly figure peering out from behind Craig's shoulder.

He said: "We live in Helston and went to Church Cove for a walk, we parked at the National Trust bit and normally walk from there to Poldhu.

"We took some photos of the day out from the same area, some of the view and selfies.

"Normally we just take the photos and don’t look at them 'til we get back and post them online."

Craig, who works in RNAS Culdrose's logistics department, said that later his partner noticed something unusual on one of the pictures...."

97996303_2922496384643660_9066164959532023808_n.jpg

(Image: Craig Thomas 2020)

That's a good one! Any ideas, fellow Forteans?
Click to expand...

For a typical phone selfie, the depth of field is suspiciously shallow. It looks as though someone's taken a shot of a window with an amusing reflection in it (the black face), then decided to 'shop in themselves on top of it.

Here's a randomly-selected selfie off the Intermong [Internet]. Note how the background is tightly in focus:

iu


Compare with the blurred background in the questioned shot above.

maximus otter
 
Last edited by a moderator:
maximus otter said:
For a typical phone selfie, the depth of field is suspiciously shallow. It looks as though someone's taken a shot of a window with an amusing reflection in it (the black face), then decided to 'shop in themselves on top of it.

Here's a randomly-selected selfie off the Intermong. Note how the background is tightly in focus:

iu


Compare with the blurred background in the questioned shot above.

maximus otter
Click to expand...
I don't for a minute think that the Cornwall picture is genuinely anomalous, but bokeh is apparently a thing these days. So the blurred background might not be so suspicious in and of itself.
 
Krepostnoi said:
I don't for a minute think that the Cornwall picture is genuinely anomalous, but bokeh is apparently a thing these days. So the blurred background might not be so suspicious in and of itself.
Click to expand...

I'm dubious. When people talk about bokeh, they mean aesthetically-pleasing light effects like this:

iu


... not just "an out-of-focus background to make our lovely faces pop".

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
...Here's a randomly-selected selfie off the Intermong.
Click to expand...

Perhaps I'm an oversensitive type, but is there really any need to use such terms? Swear as much as you want but Mong/Mongoloid went out in the 1970s..

From an earlier post:
AnonyJoolz said:
Hi I generally really like your posts but can I respectfully please ask that you don't use such terms on here? Maybe it's because I grew up with my late uncle, who had Down syndrome and we're still missing him very much (he died 4 years ago this week).

When I was a kid (and adult) I heard so many casual names being thrown around - Mong, Mongoloid, Retard, Downer, Downy, Spazz etc etc. He was one of the world's generous and gregarious people, universally loved and in a way I'm glad he's not here to experience (as you say) selfish people with mental capacity act like entitled wankers.
Click to expand...


Frideswide said:
ooooh! luvverly! :D

can someone please reverse the colours of the extra face? as in print the negative?
Click to expand...

That was my impression too, it looked like a negative image. Then I thought - with digital photos do such 'negatives' appear, and how common are odd digital artifacts, and can they creep into other photos? I don't have enough tech expertise (ie., any!) to know if such things are possible.

Edited to add:

I just went online and did a negative invert on a freebie photo site. This is what I got:

photofunny.net_.jpg
 
Last edited:
Krepostnoi said:
I don't for a minute think that the Cornwall picture is genuinely anomalous, but bokeh is apparently a thing these days. So the blurred background might not be so suspicious in and of itself.
Click to expand...

The surprisingly good camera on my Samsung phone allows you to use a 'Pro' mode and go old school if you want to bugger around with aperture and shutter speed settings and adjust depth of field - so it's definitely possible to create bokeh at the point you take the image.

That said (and with the qualification that although I know my way around a DSLR and take quite a lot of photographs, I am nowhere near what you might class a camera nerd, and therefore may well be talking right out of my backside) the bokeh on the image in question looks, to my mind, suspiciously flat. Admittedly, variation in blurring will depend on the relative distance of the various points in the image to the lens - and when all discernible points are beyond a certain distance then the bokeh will appear more one dimensional - but, still, I think there's a possibility that this image could have been shopped after the fact.

Edit: There may well be in camera settings that create bokeh for you, and which will result in the flatness I mention - not sure.
 
Last edited:
AnonyJoolz said:
I just went online and did a negative invert on a freebie photo site. This is what I got:
Click to expand...
You see what I mean about the line along his edge? It smacks of being wrong somehow. I might be wrong. It was a bit less fuzzy when I did it (no doubt compressed a bit here)
 
Eponastill said:
You see what I mean about the line along his edge? It smacks of being wrong somehow. I might be wrong. It was a bit less fuzzy when I did it (no doubt compressed a bit here)
Click to expand...

yes, I can see it more clearly in the reversed image. Also possibly hair?
 
I am reminded of the 'ghosts' from the film White Noise (possibly the last really scary movie I saw, I decided after that not to subject my psyche to similar stuff).

I am wondering if digital artifacts are at all possible accidentally? A bit like accidental double exposures and the like, in the days of 35mm film? Could images ever become mixed in a similar way due to glitches in the software? I have no idea.
 
AnonyJoolz said:
... I am wondering if digital artifacts are at all possible accidentally? A bit like accidental double exposures and the like, in the days of 35mm film? Could images ever become mixed in a similar way due to glitches in the software? I have no idea.
Click to expand...

It's conceivable, but relatively improbable compared to old school "wet" photography.

The most likely form of digital artifacts would be those that occur during photo viewing / editing / manipulation using resident software, then somehow get saved as part of the image file.
 
AnonyJoolz said:
I am reminded of the 'ghosts' from the film White Noise (possibly the last really scary movie I saw, I decided after that not to subject my psyche to similar stuff).

I am wondering if digital artifacts are at all possible accidentally? A bit like accidental double exposures and the like, in the days of 35mm film? Could images ever become mixed in a similar way due to glitches in the software? I have no idea.
Click to expand...

But something else kept nagging at me, the image that keeps popping up are some figures from this very creative and striking video. Possibly the most creative thing Mel B/G/whatever has ever been involved in:

(probably NSFW)


A CGI dummy figure before customisation?
 
AnonyJoolz said:
That was my impression too, it looked like a negative image. Then I thought - with digital photos do such 'negatives' appear, and how common are odd digital artifacts, and can they creep into other photos? I don't have enough tech expertise (ie., any!) to know if such things are possible.

Edited to add:

I just went online and did a negative invert on a freebie photo site. This is what I got:
View attachment 26391
Click to expand...
Looks a bit more "3D", here.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
AnonyJoolz said:
But something else kept nagging at me, the image that keeps popping up are some figures from this very creative and striking video. Possibly the most creative thing Mel B/G/whatever has ever been involved in:

(probably NSFW)


A CGI dummy figure before customisation?
Click to expand...
I didn't know Mel Giedroyc was so rad.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I see this kind of thing a lot. It means we don't ever get the best possible video quality.
Why don't these people just figure out a way to transfer the original video?
Click to expand...
I share the frustration. I'm willing to guess that access to the original recordings is bound up in a morass of data protection stipulations, especially if the location is somewhere sensitive like a hospital. So the mobile phone recordings are probably themselves in breach of policy, but there won't be the same audit trail of which workstation downloaded the relevant video file when.

And, yes, of course, the second or third generation quality of the recording is a gift to fakers.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Why don't these people just figure out a way to transfer the original video?
Click to expand...
There are several reasons I can think of for this other than "makes it easier to do CGI".

I've had the displeasure of having to work with several large scale video recording systems. They've uniformly had terrible software that barely works and is extremely finicky. Recording high def video at good framerates also takes higher end equipment, and storage costs for that increase quickly the longer you want to keep video, so people generally go with "good enough" quality.

The video formats on these systems are generally proprietary and not something you can just copy over to another computer and play (this increases your lock-in to that vendor). Also the actual computer being used to store the video is not likely to be in the same physical location as the monitors so there's not going to be any security guard plugging a usb stick in and copying the video over (if professionally set up the computer recording the video is going to be in a server room somewhere that the people monitoring the video are unlikely to have physical access to). Finally, the people monitoring the video screens are not IT people, and likely have little idea where the video is being stored in order to access it outside of the monitoring software.

There could also be some level of desire to record with the camera facing the monitor to prove that is it being shown on a security system as opposed to just playing in a random window of a desktop computer. Appearing on the security system makes it psychologically "less fake".
 
I think there is also a gap between our expectations as good forteans ("show us the high quality video so we can go through it frame-by-frame!") and what is 'good enough' for normal people who just want to share a weird/cool thing with their friends.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top