This photo was taken by Claudia Ables (jungle24@yahoo.com) of her young daughter. Ables says that when the family moved into a new home in February 2000, her daughter began to speak to and about someone named Peter, whom Ables and her husband dismissed as an imaginary friend. However, the Ableses also claim to have heard strange whistling, seen objects moving of their own volition, encountered weird shadows, and experienced other unusual phenomenon in their new residence. On July 17, 2000, Ables says she took a series of photos with a MVC-FD73 Sony Digital Mavica. In one, the head of a man can be seen above her daughter's shoulder. A strange blue glow surrounds him and spreads around the little girl. Ables says she does not recognize the man and it is not a face on a television screen behind her daughter. She points out that the television can be seen to the left of her child and that it was showing cartoon at the time the picture was taken. Although the photo looks like a composite, this digital ghost is so unusual that it gives me pause. I can say that, if genuine, it is much sharper and clearer then any transcommunication image I have ever seen. If any reader has expertise in digital photography, please contact me with your opinion. lisby@earthlink.net Update 5/04 I recently received this e-mail with some informative comments on this image from ib1yysguy@msn.com. "I'm a photojournalist working in Washington State. I shoot digital photos all day, every day and have become pretty familiar with digital process and image manipulation...I just wanted to point out a few things about this photo. First of all, digital cameras (including mine, which is worth almost as much as my car) are not capable of double exposures the way film cameras are. Sometimes people will take a shot, forget to wind the film, take another, and then look surprised when a strange figure shows up superimposed over another image. Weird? Not really. But digital camera developers just assume if someone wants this to happen, they'll do it themselves in Photoshop. So that rules out that particular possibility since this image was taken with a Sony digital camera. "My other observation is the color balance of the image and the balance of light. The faces are lit differently. The light on the girl is lit from the upper left. The face of the man to the right is lit from below the face. This is sometimes done by fathers holding a flashlight below their chin while telling their kids a scary story in the dark--or by people trying to make a spooky photograph. You'll also notice that the white balance of the man and the background with the TV matches up pretty close. His face is very magenta next to the blue background, which would happen if you tweaked the color levels in a photo-processing program or had your digital camera set strangely. However, the face of the girl has accurately rendered skin tones (If you want to check for yourself open it in Photoshop and examine the numbers. They'll probably read about 40% magenta, 45% yellow, and probably 25% cyan--which is pretty close to what skin tones should read.) The skin tones of the girl make no sense to me in conjunction with the background, leading me to believe that her face was digitally dubbed on top of Peter's image. This may also account for the blue hazing around her head, which is probably just shoddy Photoshop work." |
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