Fake 9/11 picture?

28  2012-07-17 by evoken1

This was posted on /r/pics recently:

http://i.imgur.com/W3mPj.jpg

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/wj34r/903_am/

I posted this but I was too late to the thread to get a response:

Is this picture even real?

The timing on the photo is unbelievable, it would've had to be taken a split second after the plane came into the photographer's field of vision. The plane also looks blurry and on a weird angle.

It also seems unusual that such an iconic picture would not have been all over the media and newspapers. This is the first time I have ever seen it.

To me it just seems like a fraudulent, yet extremely powerful and controlling image, used by the media to freshly remind the public what happened.

Thoughts? Any photoshop experts in here?

17 comments

I did a tineye search and the first few things that came up said 911 hoax. I looked at the image in photoshop and the buildings seem to have originated at a different resolution. I'm going with fake

It's actually pretty feasible that this picture could be taken. The photographer could simply have been taking a picture of the first tower (which had already been hit) and unbeknown to him, captured the second plane approaching.

With that being said I have no idea whether or not it's fake, but anything is possible

well, as I remember it, it was originally posted in /r/PerfectTiming as a joke, and I believe it got removed there, so yes, I think you are right about it being fake and shopped, but im not sure of the conspiracy behind this, very interesting, I like the way you think!

It may be fake, but it is very possible that someone got a lucky shot while taking a picture of the first plane damage

It could be one frame of a video.

The people and buildings may not be blurred, because they are moving SO much slower than an airplane AND because they may have just been staring - like most of us; WTC and the other background planes are out of focus, because they are far away and the camera was focussed on the closer objects. Just a hypothesis.

Except that there is no video for this...

This is how I take all my photos. I take a short vid and grab the best looking frame. Works best for people or, in this case, planes hitting buildings.

If you can find a site like this (it's unfortunately closed down) it might help. I couldn't find one.

http://www.errorlevelanalysis.com/

New site, commented here.

[deleted]

I know some of these words...

Seems real. Nothing major stands out in the error level analysis.

I don't know. I have following 9/11 since day one and have not seen it before. If it is fake it is very good.

Having those spots where light and dark meet and on windows where light acts differently are normal, there is nothing major that stands out as this being faked. Look at this example as some serious photoshopping of a Victoria's Secret model (SFW, she's wearing a dress).

Her head and upper torso looks like Forever Alone on the error analysis.

I'm going with fake. It looks too well set up and the image of the plane reminds me of stills from the Battery Park video but skewed slightly. You could argue that this is simply because of the photo capturing the same event, but the lighting is almost identical and the south tower looks slightly bent for some reason?

However, there seems to be a brown strip at the bottom and light shining through at the edges, as well as the picture being very slightly at an angle which suggests a 35mm photo having been scanned in, the edges and brown border meaning that the photo hasn't been properly placed on the scanner bed. Digital cameras were both somewhat rare and pretty average quality back in those days, and phone cameras didn't exist at all.

Does Photoshopping an image then screen-capping the resulting image and saving it as a new file break the error analysis and make an image appear real? Not a rhetorical question - I genuinely don't know and would be interested to find out.