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Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Friday, February 27, 2009

In which Jonathan and the cat commit image fraud

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/02/19/is-100ft-long-snake-mythical-borneo-monster-or-just-a-photo-fake-115875-21137187/

The Daily Mirror describes the latest rather dubious giant snake photographs from Borneo (see yesterday's post) as a "clever piece of photo editing". Having too much time on my hands and a copy of adobe photoshop I decided to see just how clever a piece of photo editing it actually was.

12:20 I open Adobe Photoshop and Google Earth
12:22 I find Bideford Bay on Google Earth and press the "print screen" button on my keyboard
12:24 The cat comes into the office and jumps on the keyboard
12:25 I swear at the cat
12:26 I start again
12:28 After a bit of mucking about I have the following image as a *.jpg on photoshop


12:30 I then type the words 'swimming snake' into Goodle.com/images and find This URL
12:32 I download this picture

12:34 The cat comes back in and jumps onto my lap. We make friends again and I waste several minutes fussing him
23:36 Using the magic eraser tool I do a fairly half-arsed job at getting ridof the background and produce this:
12:38 With the cat still on my knee I paste the snake image onto the image of the Torridge Estuary. I then blur it a little bit, and making sure that I have an opacity of about 40% I resize the snake and cover it with a pasted image of the muddy water.
12:40 We have this - conclusive proof that giant snakes swim up and down the River Torrisge between Bideford and Appledore.

If I had paid more attention to the job in hand, rather than only taking twenty minutes (most of which was spent alternatively playing with the cat, or remonstrating him for his sins) I could have done a much more convincing job.

So If the Daily Mirror really thinks that the Borneo image is a "clever piece of photo editing" can I have a job in the Art Department? I am, sure that they pay more than I earn at the moment..

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The guy is stupid does he really think that is going to work I mean come on that is totally fake.