NYCkayaker Wow.

[David Gottlieb]

Hey Rich,

It's the party pooper. No, I really want those photos to be real, but I
enlarged them as best I could in Aperture, (Apple's professional digital
software) but the JPGs are of rather poor quality. On quick examination they
seemed to be stitched, but I'll try to examine them more closely later.
Hopefully I am wrong about my first assessment and perhaps spoke too soon.
The last one really looked doctored with shadows at different angles and
what looks like a lot of manipulation and very soft definition between the
kayak and the whale.

I've watched whales off of Cape Cod, in the Bay of Fundy, off the Pacific
Coast From Mexico to Alaska. I've always seen displacement of water from
breeching of large whales, although they can come up relatively quiet if
they want. And they can be incredibly fast. The video Dennis posted (despite
google's buffering problems I encountered) was more exciting than the daily
mail pics. A couple of years ago on the st. Lawrence Seaway in Eastern
Quebec I gpt to withness Blue Whales but they didn't breach. They just
surfaced a bit to get air and look around.

Anyway, I am thinking of heading up to the St. lawrence in Eastern Quebec or
the Atlantic Coast off of Nova Scotia for a week or two of whale-watching &
kayaking in August depending upon work.... Anyone up for an adventure. No
fake photos will be taken....

Now here is a doctored photo with much better definition that appeared in
National Geographic Adventure. Much harder to tell at first if it was an
aggregation of two photos but National Geog. Adventure admitted that they
were duped....

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1014&message=17604132






On 3/4/08 9:16 PM, "Rich Kulawiec" <rsk at rockandwater.net> wrote:

> Putting aside your other points (which I think may well be
> correct) just for a moment...
> 
> On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 01:37:42PM -0500, David Gottlieb wrote:
>> Also, the water is much too calm and the
>> background is nearly the same on all pics.
> 
> If they were taken at the same location, then the background
> *would* be nearly the same.
> 
> As to water character, I've paddled off Hawaii in the winter.  (You may
> now all snicker at the hapless river paddler.)  On the lee side of the
> islands, e.g. Lanikai, the sea was quite calm aside from a few near-shore
> breakers and a few around the Mokalua islands.  It remained so for
> several days in a row, until a northern Pacific storm kicked up.
> 
> (On other hand, up on the north shore while that storm was active,
> things were not quite not so serene and I provided some...
> quality entertainment for amused onlookers.
> 
> Words of wisdom from another West Virginia river guide of my acquaintance:
> "It is better to watch the show than to be the show.")
> 
> When I get a chance, I'll take a close look at those photos
> with ImageMagick and see if signs of tampering surface.
> 
> ---Rsk
> 
> 
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