Great un-PhotoShopped photos

January 13, 2016 • 2:45 pm

Reader Stephen Barnard, himself adept at photography, called my attention to a piece on Bright Side called “The 100 best photographs ever taken without photo shop“. Now I can’t vouch for that statement, but the photos are superb. Go see them; I’ll show you only ten, with attributions when they are given (captions come from the site). Because every picture was superb, this selection was hard to make, and you must go look at every picture!

The “supermoon” in a radio telescope:

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An eagle soaring over a lake in Canada:

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© Fred Johns

Breaking the sound barrier:

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© Darek Siusta

Snow express:

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Times Square, New York, USA; a view from below:

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©Andrew Thomas

Tiny ants surrounded a drop of honey, Malaysia:

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© Husni Che Ngah

Jeep Ghost:

206705-1000-144716078713492810-R3L8T8D-950-13
Twitter

Sleeping cloud:

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© Dmitry Iskhakov

Angels:

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© Robert Radomski

Yunnan, China:

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ytimg

Lagniappe: “Rango plays guitar”:

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©Aditya Permana

 

43 thoughts on “Great un-PhotoShopped photos”

    1. I had that image as the screensaver photo for several weeks when working with an aviation geek too, and he described it as a “vapour cone” too. With abundant pneumatic systems venting all over the rig, no further debate was needed. Still impressive.

      2. (didn’t work, try again…)

        For a breaking-the-sound-barrier shockwave you can see, try this:
        http://www.andrewgraves.biz/ssc_stuff/images/exCS/Shock_s.jpg
        or this:
        http://www.andrewgraves.biz/ssc_stuff/images/exCS/Waves_s.jpg

        (To see the shock waves properly in the bottom photo, go to
        http://www.andrewgraves.biz/ssc_stuff/SSC_pics.htm

        and click on the bottom thumbnail)

        Then there’s this, which also happens to feature a remarkable mirage effect:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYEtQGLzvkI

        cr

    4. Thanks, I thought I recognized the phenomena as somehow “not breaking the sound barrier”!

      [Disclaimer: I’m not an aviation geek. ;-)]

  3. All 100 are terrific. My favorite is “Spectacular ice formations on a mountaintop in Slovenia.”

  4. Mine is the Tianzi mtn. in china, the inspiration for Avatar. I saw it right away without reading the caption first.

  6. I’m suspicious of the Rango plays Guitar photo. There’s a lot of these kind of photos going around where the photographers have posed distressed, drugged and chilled animals, sometimes using wires into anthropomorphic poses for these photos. Does anyone know the back story on this one?

    1. Agreed. I am pretty sure the statement “no animals were harmed during the making of this picture” cannot be made truthfully about this picture.

    2. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were abuse going on, but it is possible to get pictures like that without abusing the lizard. Depending on the lizard and your notion of abuse.

      Some lizards, including the anoles in our area, will very often “play dead” when handled by a human. My kids used to catch and release them all the time when they where younger. They found that if they gently rubbed the lizards belly that almost always induced them to play dead for a minute or so. A typical pose looked very much like the lizard in the guitar pic above.

  7. I’m left wondering, what is the Latin binomial for those angels? It doesn’t look from the photograph like more than one of them would fit on the head of a pin.

    1. They look like great white egrets , Ardea alba. You are right that it would require a pretty large pin to accommodate even one!

    2. Since the photo was taken by a Polish photographer, I would venture that these are cranes in Poland on a misty morning sometime in March. This is when they come back from the south in big groups.

  10. While the images may not be composited in PhotoShop I’m pretty sure that many have been enhanced either in PhotoShop or Lightroom.

  11. The super moon in the radio telescope may not have been photoshopped but it wasn’t come by natural. In the old days of film people would sandwich two slides to make a composite – that’s what this photo reminds me of.

    1. Yes, Pegman calls it a “composit”, so it was almost certainly Photoshopped. On the other hand, I don’t know any reason this could not have been done “live” if the distances and focal length of the lens was correct.

  13. The China one and the Eagle are the best two for me, The China one especially is an terrific shot.

  14. As Chris Moffat says above, the moon one (first photo in the post) is highly suspicious.

    Having photographed the moon at sunset, a lot, I don’t believe it could be that crisp, that close to the horizon.

    Here is the moon shot at 400mm (full frame 35mm film shot) on a humid day (and this moon is much higher above the horizon and shot from a high viewpoint — all of which tend to reduce the fuzz effect of the atmosphere):

    http://www.berettaconsulting.com/barbarossa/Landscape/Moonrise%20from%20Mt%20Constitution%20Summer%201990.jpg

    Also, that size moon in the photo implies an effective focal length of 1300 mm (35mm format) (possibly effected through cropping, but the situation is the same, regardless)*.

    A couple of problems with this:

    1. The moon moves across the frame at that focal length so quickly, you would never catch it like this. A clockwork doesn’t help, because then the ground (antenna) is moving.

    This is not definitive, since one could pre-calculate the position of the moon and be set up in exactly (and I mean exactly — the precision is too perfect to be believable) the right spot.

    2. If this were shot at 1300 mm, then all the foreground would look a lot “flatter” than it does. The bushes and antenna in the foreground would seem to be in the same (z-axis) plane as the trees on the horizon.

    3. Note the mist between the ground hills. If it were that humid, you wouldn’t get a crisp moon image.

    4. Where is the receiving antenna of the dish? It should be occluding the moon above the dish** … (dead giveaway in my opinion.)

    (* On my screen, the moon is 2.47 inch diameter, the diagonal frame size is 7.56 (moon is 32.67% of the diagonal frame angle). The angle of the moon’s disc varies from 0.489 deg. to 0.568 deg. (1.06% to 1.24% of the diagonal angle of a 50mm lens). The diagonal frame angle for 50mm at 35mm format is 46°.

    Maximum benefit of the doubt, using 0.568 deg. The effective focal length is: 1300 mm. This is possible using “regular” equipment (though very expensive) – either a 1300mm lens or 650/700 with a doubler, or cropping with a somewhat shorter lens.)

    (** Unless the dsih were nearly a hemisphere, the antenna must be visible above the plane of the antenna’s edge and the antenna is shown pointing nearly at the zenith.)

      1. But you gave a great explanation of why the picture must be photo-shopped so the comment was not by any means redundant.

    3. OK. I’m convinced. It would have to be photoshopped, even if we didn’t already know it was. Great analysis.

      1. I *hate* fucking Photoshop!!!

        (Not because it’s overpriced / overcomplicated yadda yadda, but because the floods of Photoslopped images discredit the few really striking photographs.

        I was given a calendar of really spectacular scenic photos – striped red/orange banded sandstone cliffs in the Nevada(?) desert, a string of circular green islands in the Maldives(?), extraordinary orange dunes above a grey flat in the Namib desert… I carefully tracked all these down and satisfied myself they are absolutely genuine. And all that anyone who sees it says is, “yeah, Photoshop”.

        cr

        1. I hear you man…but I suspect your calendar used PS. Not to weirdly alter the components of an image or to create fantastic composites, but to tweak and adjust color and contrast, etc. PS is the best tool for post production enhancement of a kind which is comparable to the way old film based imaging was processed in the darkroom. A lot of this processing is quite subtle – for example enhancing the “latitude” or range of proper exposure from deep shadows to bright highlights. Without these changes the original photo can look flat. To me that kind of Photoshopping is a big advantage of digital photography and fair game for calendars.

          1. (Well personally I would champion Gimp for such adjustment. And I’ve used it for that – e.g. I had a number of photos of rally cars that were ‘faded’ out by hanging dust, and it was miraculous how a little adjustment restored the colour. )

            I wouldn’t call that sort of adjustment ‘faking’, I think it’s acceptable. But I think the sort of treatment most people mean when they say ‘Photoshopped’ – and what I would call faking – is where elements of two or more photos have been combined to give an image that never occurred naturally.

            cr

  17. I’m surprised PCC didn’t showcase the squirrel photo:
    brightside.me/article/100-best-photographs-without-photoshop-46555/?image=215455#image215155

  18. I’m highly skeptical that the “Jeep Ghost” photo is not a ‘shop, either. It seems highly unlikely that the Jeep could back away from the ice formation without fracturing its connection to the ground. All the little nooks and crannies would “key” the ice to the vehicle much more than the dripping icicles would anchor it to the ground.

  20. Very aesthetic and beautiful photos. who is the author of the sheep “snow express” and where is the locationj

  22. That “supermoon in a radio telescope” photo strikes me as a visual metaphor for the anthropic principle — the effect being the product of the observer’s location and timing, rather than the product of the moon having been fine-tuned to fit someday in the dish of a telescope.

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