Photo puzzler

[gwiz]

gezalenko said:

This suggests that not only is the camera much further away in the second shot, it's also higher up. Maybe only a couple of feet or so, but it changes the relative positions of all the subjects significantly.

Definitely higher, several metres to get the top of the LM level with the ridge-line in the background.
It always amazes me that the HBs expect the lunar surface to be flat and point to shadow "anomalies" that are easily explained by height changes. Surely a fake on a sound stage would be flatter than real landscape and less likely to show these "anomalies", so the "anomalies" are actually evidence against the hoax theory.

[JayUtah]

Here is another example of Jack White's unwillingness or inability to exercise even the most basic photographic analysis skills. www.clavius.org/earthmt.html

I find it amusing we have come full circle. Turbonium, the grandfather of this current forum was started precisely to describe this and other Jack White photos five years ago. The originator was a teenager who had been sent these photos by White with permission to post them on the site. This was quite important at the time, because it allowed us to review them in public. See, White's previous discussions took place in a very closed forum. That didn't meet the definition of "publish" according to U.S. law, and I can't review anything publicly that hasn't first been published. (An often-forgotten stipulation for "fair use" under U.S. copyright law is that "fair use" applies only to published works. Works that are privately circulated are not eligible for "fair use".) Of course now that Aulis has consented to publish White's photos it's not very important.

For at least five years critics have been pointing out the elementary basics of photographic interpretation to Jack White, and for all that time White has been largely ignoring them, preferring to style himself to a small (but disturbingly faithful) group of followers as a master photographic analyst. Hey, if you never acknowledge your critics you can style yourself as whatever you want.

Of course since Jack White has zero training in photographic analysis and interpretation (which, contrary to popular opinion, is not just applying "common sense" to photographs but rather involves many scientific principles), we can propose that his errors are just layman's misunderstandings. But people who make honest mistakes are generally cordial about accepting criticism and admitting error where necessary. Jack White does none of this, and in fact sent me an e-mail responding to the two Clavius pages I wrote in which he called me an "ignorant a-hole" (among other things) and threatened me with legal action. Clearly Jack White does not fit the mold of an honest but misguided researcher.

So we can conclude possibly that Jack White is incredibly stupid, or that he is deliberately deceptive. Or maybe a little of both. His general unwillingness to respond to his critics seems to indicate he is hiding from opposition. That is a sign of deception, not of stupidity. Further, the threats of legal action are more consistent with deception than of stupidity. On the other hand, White demonstrates an uncanny lack of prowess at spatial reasoning. He has trouble distinguishing simple objects and simply-evidenced changes in aspect in the same object. He cannot, for example, tell what side of the Apollo lunar module he is looking at in any particular instance. If honest, those failings would indicate some sort of impairment.

The question of why Jack White keeps making the same mistakes over and over again is ambivalent. He could simply not understand anything at all about real photographic interpretation and so simply not realize that his statements are rubbish. Or he could be trying the same honed tactics over and over again, knowing that they work at least on some kinds of people.

Personally I believe White is deliberately deceiving people. But then obviously I have no way of knowing what's really going on in his mind. Whatever the case, his attempts at photographic analysis are absolutely laughable.

[hubcapdave69]

Having recently sparred with the man myself, I'd have to agree, eiher he's deluded himself into thinking he knows what he's doing or he is being deliberately deceptive.

According to him, in order for me to have taken this picture:

I had to defy the laws of physics.

He seems also to label those who challenge him as frauds, or tools of NASA, the DOD, etc.

[JayUtah]

Having recently sparred with the man myself, I'd have to agree, eiher he's deluded himself into thinking he knows what he's doing or he is being deliberately deceptive.

Yes, I guess the alternative we haven't considered is that he's mentally ill.

According to him, in order for me to have taken this picture: ...I had to defy the laws of physics.

That's only the latest in a long string of photographs he says are "impossible" despite their having been taken by almost anyone under almost any circumstances.

Many conspiracist arguments fall into this general syllogism:

These are the criteria required for authenticity.
The observed evidence for an occurrence does not match the criteria;
therefore, the occurrence is not authentic.

In form this is a "validating" syllogism, which is the logician's way of stating that the syllogism is structurally and inferentially sound. That makes it seem like a strong line of reasoning -- which it would be if the premises held.

The conspiracist never adequately substantiates the major premise. That is, if a certain set of criteria is advanced as being the properties of authentic photographs and lacking in false photos, then almost nothing is done to confirm that real photographs have that property and fake photos cannot. As David Percy has done, Jack White has suggested a set of rules that real photos must follow. But if real photos break those rules, then the rules cannot be used to distinguish faithfully between real photos and fakes.

Here is an example of the same categorical syllogism, only with a set of premises that reveal the flaw in its application.

One must be a man in order to be a good doctor.
Cheryl is not a man;
therefore, Cheryl is not a good doctor.

Again, the syllogism is of validating form. However the major premise lacks any connection to the real world. Thus although the syllogism is properly reasoned from premise to conclusion, the conclusion does not reflect reality because the major premise does not reflect reality.

Putting Jack White's specific claims into the syllogism yields:

In a true photograph containing the photographer's shadow, the shadow must point toward the center of the photo.
In the photo of the Apollo 11 lunar module taken from West Crater, the photographer's shadow is instead aligned with the left edge and does not point toward the center of the photo;
therefore, the photo is not a true photograph.

Again, soundly reasoned according to structure, but fails on the major premise. As we have shown through countless example photographs and through detailed mathematical discussion, the major premise does not hold for all photographs (nor, indeed, for most photographs). Thus, if there are authentic photographs that don't exhibit that criteria, then some particular photograph that fails that criteria cannot be deemed -- on the basis of the offered criteria -- inauthentic.

This is a very roundabout way of saying what I've been saying all along: if you don't substantiate your expectations then others can't be expected to agree with them.

But it's useful to point this out in formal terms because White has allied himself with people who have legitimate scientific credentials (Fetzer, Costella, maybe others) and who throw their weight around. Inappropriately, we discover. But we have to show how we discovered it. Despite their credentials, the scientists in White's corner are behaving most unscientifically; and when we make a claim such as that, we have to be prepared to back it up with the formal argument.

He seems also to label those who challenge him as frauds, or tools of NASA, the DOD, etc.

Yes. He writes off all critics as disinformationists without discussing the substance of their criticism. His favorite label is provacateur, suggesting that the critics -- not he -- are the ones trying to stir up trouble.

Whatever means he uses to evade criticism, it properly conveys the notion that he is afraid of people examining his findings. People who are confident in their findings have a basis on which to respond substantially to criticism.

[Bob B.]

Here's an illustration I made about a year ago showing how hubcapdave69's photograph does not defy the laws of physics:

[hubcapdave69]

Actually, the way I did my picture was to stand with my back directly to the sun and hold my camera at an angle to my front, but it's a similar effect.

Something else I just noticed about the picture I took. If you look at my shadow and the shadow made by the pole (upper right hand part of the picture), you can see they seem to be at different angles!

[Sticks]

This is mine

[turbonium]

I still am trying to understand something about the photos. I have posted below some of Jay's text (in bold) and the images from the Clavius webpage.
In Fig. 3 the eye can still detect a difference in appearance between what are supposed to be identical summit lines. This is because the camera is tilted slightly differently in each photo. In Fig. 4 the scale of the images is preserved as in Fig. 3, but the photos have been registered to show the alignment of the foothill horizon and the ridgeline and summit line.

It is common to assume that lunar mountains are nearby because their rounded shape resembles hills on earth, and because the lack of atmosphere denies the depth cueing that is provided by atmospheric attenuation on earth ("haze"). Nevertheless the South Massif is kilometers away from the landing site. Although the photographs are taken from positions more than a hundred meters apart, that makes a negligible difference in the appearance of mountains that are kilometers away and on the order of a thousand meters high.

Thus we correctly expect to see a vast difference in the apparent size of the lunar module, but little or no difference in the apparent size of distant mountains.
Fig.3
Fig.4

In Fig.3 I see the vast difference in apparent size of the lem, but also, I still see a vast difference in the apparent size of the mountain.

And in Fig.4, there are now two lems in view! I know that was not the intent of merging the two images, but it has only made the explanation more befuddling to me.

I know from looking at the links here that Jay was using a penguin and a mountain to make points about Jack White's analyses. But I didn't find an example of a large penguin/small mountain comparing to a small penguin/large mountain. Is there one that I missed somewhere? Or can a similar example be shown to me?

I guess I'm also still a bit confused on the explanations so far! Please bear with me if possible.

[PhantomWolf]

It's your brain. Well not just yours, everyones. Our brains try and decide the size of things by referances. As we look off into the distance, we see trees, telephone poles and such which are smaller because of the distance, but because we know their real size, our brains simply resize things to what we expect.

However, look at the images again. What clues do we have as to distance and size? Pretty much only the LM. Worse still the mountain is rounded and smooth, like we'd expect a hill to be, not a mountain. This really throws our brains a curveball. Without the visual clues to distance and size, our brains pretty much scramble. With only the LM as a reference it looks strange when one image has a big LM and one a small LM and so we 'see' the mountain in the small LM photo as bigger.

What Jay does by overlapping the images is to show that in reality, the image of the mountain is actually the same in both cases. That's the important bit. Because if the mountain is a real 3D object some distance away and photographed in sitution, we expect that a change of few hundred metres isn't going to change its size all that much in the image, ie the physical area the mountain takes up on the image. Jay shows that this expectation is realised in this example.

It's really best not to worry about the LM at all and concentrate on the mountain and note that it's size in the images hasn't changed, as shown by the overlapping. The size of the LM changing is simply that proportinally, you have moved futher from it, than the mountains.

Consider it this way. If the first image was 10m from the LM and the 12,000m from the Mountain and then we move back 150m, the move is 15x the distance to the LM for the second image, and so we can expect the LM to be 6.7% the size, while the change in distance from the mountain is only 1.0125x the original distance. That means it still appear to be 98.8% of it's original size. That's what we expect, and as you can see, that's pretty much what happens in the images.

[Joe Durnavich]

The key to understanding how sizes of objects change in photographs, turbonium, is to first understand that the camera's field of view increases with distance. Look at Bob B.'s drawing above in post #19, specifically the SIDE VIEW graphic at the top.

The red lines represent the camera's field of view. The closer an object is to the camera, the more it fills the camera's field of view, and the larger it appears relative to objects farther away.

The same principles of optics apply to your eyes and your vision, but unless you are an artist, you rarely notice that your field of view increases with distance from you. The effect is non-intuitive, which is why you are surprised when you see it in a photograph.

[PeterB]

Turbonium

PhantomWolf has it.

In both photographs the mountains are many kilometres away. But between the photos, the photgrapher has moved 100 metres or so further away from both the mountains and the LM.

Because the first photo was taken so close to the LM, 100 metres makes a big difference to the size of the LM, but virtually no difference to the size of the mountains.

Jack White then seals the apparent anomaly by cropping the second photo and blowing it up so the LM in that photo looks the same size as the one in the first photo.

So there's a two-fold problem. Your perceptual problems (caused by the strangeness of the Moon) were compounded by Jack's problem in manipulating the photos without explaining what he was doing.

[Bob B.]

In addition to the second photo being taken from a greater distance, the photographer has also moved some to the side. This is why you see two LMs in the composite image. But just like how changing distance has a large affect on the size of the LM and little on the size of the mountain, moving side to side produces a greater apparent change in the position of the LM than in the faraway mountains. This is called parallax, which is defined as the apparent change in the direction of an object caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. As the line of sight changes, nearby objects appear to shift positions greater than faraway objects. (Hold your finger up at arms length and look at it first with one eye and then the other. Your finger will appear to change positions relative to the wall behind it.) A small side to side change in camera position results in virtually no change in the appearance of the distance mountain, but it causes a shift in the apparent position of the LM relative to the mountain. Therefore, different images will often show the same object appearing in front of different background terrain. THIS IS NOT AN ANOMALY.

[Kiwi]

turbonium said:

I still am trying to understand something about the photos...

And that is exactly why you must give up trying to analyse photographs. You just don't have the knowledge and the practical experience to do it competently. I have no problem at all with Jay's explanation, yet as you have already shown, you don't understand the many explanations you've been given. That's not our fault, it's yours.

The first time I saw an example of this sort of thing was in a photographic encyclopedia I bought in the early 70s. It had a number of photographs of a church with mountains behind it. The subject can get even more confusing when photographs are taken from different viewpoints with different focal-length lenses.

To get over any confusion I had, I went out and took my own sets of photographs of scenes that were familiar to me. This is the one thing that conspiracists who are hopeless at analysing photographs never seem to do. They know very little but kid themselves that they do, and they don't have any practical experience. Worst of all, they won't get off their butts and get some experience.

Properly experienced photographers know that so many of the so-called lunar surface photograph anomalies are not anomalies at all and that the people who claim there are anomalies are talking rubbish.

If you can't figure it out, Turbonium, just photograph from different distances a car that's parked 10-20 km from a big mountain and include both in your photos. Or use a penguin. You'll get the message. It's very simple -- don't theorise, do it yourself.

[turbonium]

If you can't figure it out, Turbonium, just photograph from different distances a car that's parked 10-20 km from a big mountain and include both in your photos. Or use a penguin. You'll get the message. It's very simple -- don't theorise, do it yourself.
That's what I've already intended to do, kiwi, and why I have left the topic as is until I do so. Lots of nice big mountains to choose from in my area, so it should not be too difficult to snap away......

[sts60]

So where do you live?

A lot of my life has been lived in the western U.S, in states with lots of mountains (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Alaska). After six years in the East, I still have to repress a snicker when someone calls the hills around here "mountains".