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Take a look at this and comment as to its authenticity.

This is not my photo, it is circulating out there in cyberspace.

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What throws the for me, is the position of the stabilator. That is an awful lot of nose up deflection.

miamiair wrote:What throws the for me, is the position of the stabilator. That is an awful lot of nose up deflection.

Clone stamp and blur tool. Look at the area around the vert stabilizers. You can see where the brah stopped playing with the blur tool.

miamiair wrote:What throws the for me, is the position of the stabilator. That is an awful lot of nose up deflection.

I've seen a lot of F-18 pictures with excessive horizontal stabilizer movement with no apparent nose position change. The F-18 in particular seems to have a rather noticeable delay between control inputs and aircraft reaction in certain speed regiments.

If the pilot does a take off roll, tucks in the gear, runs the length of the runway then pulls a hard pitch up you can get photos of the elevators deflected almost fully without the nose being pitched up.

Nosedive wrote:Clone stamp and blur tool. Look at the area around the vert stabilizers.

I'm not sure if that's clone stamping or jpeg compression artifacts. If you blow up the picture and look around the squadron logo on the tail and numbers on the nose, there are massive amounts of jpeg artifacts.

I don't think we can really tell without a higher resolution version of the photo. It's a lot like that SU-27 low pass photo from a couple of years ago.

It looks to me that someone cloned out the gear. That's just a "gut" feeling, though, and we all know our gut can mislead us.

Looks to me like his attitude is wrong...slightly nose down.

miamiair wrote:
What throws the for me, is the position of the stabilator. That is an awful lot of nose up deflection.

He'd drag the tail doing that, even at speed.

CCD, that SU27 pass was also my first thought.

That said, there's a sharp vertical line below the front of the hardpoint where the colour changes. (That shows up much more clearly on my phone.)

I wouldn't call it either way.

The jaggedness of the dark gray (taxiway) and the lighter gray (apron) makes me think this is Shopped.

ShyFlyer wrote:It looks to me that someone cloned out the gear. That's just a "gut" feeling, though, and we all know our gut can mislead us.

Looks that way to me too. What's up with the taxiway stripe under the nose? Suddenly changes direction. But compression does indeed make it hard to tell.

My biggest reason to call fake is simply that I can't imagine a fighter pilot doing that over a ramp. Runway maybe, but ramp??

But then again, I also don't know what country that is from.

I'd call it shopped, you can clearly see definition in the plants that are right next to the airplane surfaces, a-la areas not selected for the blur. Looks like he feathered the selection a bit.

Definitively photoshopped now that I have more time to look at it... and by someone that doesn't know Hornets very well. There should only be two vent panels on the lower from nose. The third one was cloned in where the open nose gear door should be.

FYI, the picture was taken at Gran Canaria

Photoshopped. Look at the bottom of the buddy tank, you can see where the gear has been cloned. Also, if it actually was going that low, it'd be over a runway, not a ramp. Looks like Las Palmas (Gran Canaria) airport.

It is indeed Las Palmas (Gran Canaria) as Click Click Doh mentioned. Here's a similar image, same tanks in the background.

Fake.

One simple forensic technique for detecting photo-manipulation is to blow the saturation out. Here you can see how pixels beneath the nose gear have been manipulated and, also, the shadow under the aircraft is very smooth and does not match the lossy compression patterns in the rest of the image, indicating added blurring:



Even without the saturation enhancement it just looks like a bad clone & blur job.

Click Click D'oh wrote:

Nosedive wrote:Clone stamp and blur tool. Look at the area around the vert stabilizers.

I'm not sure if that's clone stamping or jpeg compression artifacts. If you blow up the picture and look around the squadron logo on the tail and numbers on the nose, there are massive amounts of jpeg artifacts.

I don't think we can really tell without a higher resolution version of the photo. It's a lot like that SU-27 low pass photo from a couple of years ago.

Indeed there are artifacts, on the plane. There's hardly any artifacts in the background, and there appears to be a 5 pixel border of blur tool around the plane, which is very pronounced near the back of the plane. It's ad if the photog used the magic wand to select the profile of the plane, but the photog didn't get all the plane at the bottom. So s/he used "expand" to get the bottom, which over expanded the selected area on the top, hence the 5 pixel blur border.

Since the aircraft would have been at a not so insignificant speed, wouldn't you expect the stuff in the background to be horizontally "streaked" rather than simply blurred?

Queso wrote:Since the aircraft would have been at a not so insignificant speed, wouldn't you expect the stuff in the background to be horizontally "streaked" rather than simply blurred?

Not necessarily as it all depends on the shutter speed for the shot. This plane is flying at roughly 700 MPH and the motion blur is minimal but just enough to make it blurry:



However, in the Spanish F-18's case, note that there's motion blur in the background but none on the taxiway which is another revealing indication of photo-manipulation.

Clearly, Jeff, you've just 'shopped out the floats

Queso wrote:Since the aircraft would have been at a not so insignificant speed, wouldn't you expect the stuff in the background to be horizontally "streaked" rather than simply blurred?

Fair point, but the amount of blur would depend on the shutter speed.

1/100 would have a fair amount of blur, but 1/1000th would have a lot less blur.

For example, let's say the F/A-18 was flying at 300mph: At 1/100th of a second, the plane moves about 4.4ft. At 1/1000th, the plane moves .44 ft.

Now, someone smarter than I am could probably input these numbers into how blurry an image should be, based off how fast a person pans the camera, but I am not that smart. Someone even smarter could input telephoto length to calculate blur.

More info on the approx speeds to stop motion: http://www.passingimage.com/clients/pc_ ... n_Blur.pdf

At 1/2000th, that 100mph race car moved .07 ft. At 1/1000th, the 70 mph car moved .10 ft. At 1/500, that 40 mph car moved .11 ft. To stop motion, and stop blur, therefore, you cannot have the object move more than an inch, it appears.

Take away; It all depends on the shutter speed, Cheeseman.


Now, if we could see EXIF data in the original image, we could approximate how fast the plane was going.