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Nessie sighting?

Posted: Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:56 am
by artington
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... amera.html

You really would think, if this chap has been spending up to 60 hours a week for decades looking for the beast, that he would have been equipped with something a bit more sophisticated than a compact camera!

Re: Nessie sighting?

Posted: Sat Aug 04, 2012 12:37 pm
by Greg Beetham
Only one photo? after all that time watching out for Nessie?
Greg

Re: Nessie sighting?

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:15 pm
by Dusty
artington wrote:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... amera.html

You really would think, if this chap has been spending up to 60 hours a week for decades looking for the beast, that he would have been equipped with something a bit more sophisticated than a compact camera!
But a highly pixelated photo of something very far off is a tough one to debunk. If I wanted everyone to keep taking tours in my boat, I wouldn't want a photo so detailed that they could easily tell it was a floating log.

Dusty

Re: Nessie sighting?

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:36 pm
by harveyzone
I liked the bit where it says "After watching the object for five to ten minutes, Mr Edwards said it slowly sank below the surface and never resurfaced." Five to ten minutes? In mid summer? And only 1 photo, and no other witnesses? I reckon someone needs a boost to his boat trip business part way through a poor season.

Re: Nessie sighting?

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 5:43 pm
by David Kilpatrick
All I can say is that experts - whoever they may be - clearly aren't around when these images get put up. Any photographer with a few shots' experience using cameras can tell the perspective of a shot taken from a boat by the reduction in scale of the wind ripples and wake lines of the boat. Water is not a featureless surface. The picture clearly shows that the object photographed was NOT half a mile away, but fairly close to the boat; the perspective and scale can be judged easily from the water surface.

I'd say the object was about 20 feet away and was probably a fish large enough to break the surface briefly.

David

Re: Nessie sighting?

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 6:25 pm
by Greg Beetham
David you took the words out of my mouth, I wrote this (below) yesterday but in the end I decided to only post about his amazing reticence with the camera.
I sort of have a compositional problem with the photo, it looks like quite a ‘down’ angle vantage point the photo was taken from allowing for the distance involved, if the object was half a mile away as he estimated he must have been rather high up to get that angle one would think, but he said he was standing on the stern of the boat. It must have been a reasonably large boat to provide that amount of height at the stern but unfortunately I didn’t see any description of the vessel so that aspect remains a bit of a mystery. Then there is the question of the wind dapples on the water (it’s more of a cross chop effect, presumably the bow wave ripples left over from the vessel’s just completed passage are the horizontal ripple contribution) which don’t appear to diminish much in size from the bottom of the frame right across the distance to the object, wouldn’t they even at telephoto focal length diminish in size and frequency a little more than that over half a mile? Anyway so far the whole thing looks a little strange to my sense of perspective, but it really depends on how big the object actually was and how far away it really was and how high above the water the photographer was in fact also a most interesting detail would be what focal length was used as well. I guess if the height above the water was known and also the focal length that was used one could estimate how far away the object was and roughly how big it was too.
Another query I have is this guy spent how long looking for the ‘Nessie?’ and finally one day spent 5 minutes watching a presumably large object moving in Loch Ness and only took one photo of it…?
I might as well have another query or two, like where was the head? If it’s an air breathing ‘Plesiosaur’ type wouldn’t it need to breathe at some point, instead it apparently it just submerged and disappeared without bothering to breathe. If it was an ‘Ichthyosaur’ type it also would have to breathe but the nostril might be more whale like in that case, in any case there is the question of what those large animals would live on in Loch Ness? I thought I saw a study that found there was really not much of a large fish population living in the waters of the loch because the vast majority of it was oxygen poor despite being such an expanse of deep water that ordinarily would be expected to support a population of large fish.
Greg

Re: Nessie sighting?

Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2012 4:00 pm
by artington
I thought it looked a bit fishy