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I have caught snopes in several "errors" and never actually received a reply although a couple of corrections were made.

I have also caught Webster's dictionary in error, and never received a reply to my suggestion that they correct it in the next issue.

All part of the dumbing down of our language.

OT, this "testimony" had been bouncing around for years. It is not contemporary, Mr Scott's testimony was a decade or so ago.

Dragonfighter wrote:

VMI77 wrote:

Dragonfighter wrote:<SNIP>

Linky.(Graphic)

<SNIP> I can't tell much from any of the images because they're so small, but the image of the snake and victim together, even at the small size exhibited, does show signs of of the kind of manipulation that a not too proficient compositor would use to hide his tracks --specifically, high contrast, low resolution, and lack of detail in the parts of the images that would be joined to make a composite.

We're getting OT here but I would answer this and then leave it. Have you ever used a low resolution camera, or if old enough an Instamatic? High contrast and low detail are earmarks of such devices and an artifact from reproduction. Also having taken many pictures in South America (And the Pacific NW for that matter) lens fogging is an annoying reality.

To the specifics. The boy's pants are soaked in mucous and blood, his right ankle is still stuck (the gullet has contracted around it) in viscera, the stomach has been sheathed back, the legs are wet with mucous and cyanotic and even magnifying to where it pixelates you cannot see a point where the picture was "joined". In fact, the photos I find suspicious are always "too good". At any rate, discrediting a photo by simply saying, "It looks like a bad fake," and without further analysis shows an extreme bias.

These incidents happen more often than we care to think about, but the Amazonians are too ignorant to know what killed their son or daughter, right?

I was going to deal with that issue --basically, exposure error-- but decided to cut my response short. Yes, it could be exposure error. Although I might draw a different conclusion if I could see a larger image than the image at the link posted, it does look like overexposure. However, it is precisely because such errors really do exist that they are used to hide compositing. It's also plausible that it is just overexposure because it is occurring around the snake's belly, the naturally lightest part of the image. I'm not saying it is fake btw, (I can't even make a guess from the image I have to look at), just that it has characteristics that are typically found in faked photos. A much larger image would be needed to draw any definitive conclusion, if such a conclusion could be drawn at all.

Basically, the fact that it could be a bad exposure doesn't really tell us anything. It's also possible to make seamless composits, that while perhaps detectable by more sophisticated analysis, cannot be detected by observation. A photo at the digital level is just pixels, and anyone with the patience and skill to work at the individual pixel level can construct a composit image visually indistinguishable from a single lensed imaged. It's also true that sometimes the lens yields an image that looks so unnatural that even very experienced people will pronounce it as being photoshopped. This blog http://www.psdisasters.com/ is called Photoshop Disasters, and while many of the images clearly are disasters, some aren't, and some that get posted turn out not to have been photoshopped at all. Another problem with the site is that some of those images labeled disasters it seems to me were never intended to look realistic in the first place.

The other part of the fake question is attribution. Amazonians may well know what kills their children but there is no evidence to indicate that any such claims about these photos are being made by Amazonians or that the photos were taken in the Amazon. Lacking definitive evidence of manipulation the only way to validate photos like this is to find their source and the source images. Seeing the original sequence of images goes a long way in establishing their credibility.

Back to topic. No matter how much gun control they try to force down our throats these acts will not stop.

texas-sig wrote:Back to topic. No matter how much gun control they try to force down our throats these acts will not stop.

You're right. Also, it's my fault for taking this thread off track.

Sorry,
Chas.

Charles L. Cotton wrote:You're right. Also, it's my fault for taking this thread off track.

So who's going to click the Report button for Rule 10? (I think I heard crickets in this thread all weekend...)

Also, I'm of the opinion that Snopes, like Wikipedia, is a good place to check for a quick look at non-controversial topics. But neither is a definitive (primary) source. That's why they list references at the bottom, and you have to do your own further checking with those and others. Like an old reporter told me: stealing from one source is plagiarism; stealing from several is research.

And to get this post on-topic -- the cited email brought this to mind: "They will look and look but never really see; they will listen and listen but never understand. If they saw and understood, they might change and be forgiven." (from Mark 4:12)