Faces of the Dead: Fake Photos and Pareidolia?

During the 10/10 storm event on Lake Superior, I took video and photos of Shovel Point. In one (and only one) of my shots out of the 100s I shot everything aligned perfectly to create waves that looked like faces. Seeing faces, animals and other objects where none exist is known as pareidolia. It’s a psychological phenomenon that causes people to see faces in random objects. I usually don’t see these things, but this photo stood out, because one of the faces looks like a picture of a “ghost” I caught at the Au Sable Lighthouse one night. Plus, the shape of the spray was perfect. Right off the bat, I thought of a name for the photo. I called it “Faces of the Dead.” It’s a fitting photo, because big storms have caused lots of deaths and Lake Superior tends to not give up its dead.

I slapped the photo online and it went viral. Then, the comments started…

I shoot RAW format on my camera. In the RAW format, the image comes out of the camera flat and then I import it into Adobe Lightroom and do the typical stuff that Ansel Adams did in the black and white darkroom to his images — I actually probably do a bit less than he did. Then the image looks like I saw it or want it to look. The other option is to let the camera process the image into a JPEG. When it does this it runs it through a “photoshop”-like program and kicks out what Nikon’s engineers thought the image should look like.

This is my version of the picture that I edited in Lightroom.

This is the RAW file.

This is Nikon’s JPEG version of the file. I’m not a fan.

The reason that I bring this up is that every now and then when a photo goes popular, I get a person claiming it is “fake.” I’m not exactly sure what “fake” means in most cases. But, most of the time, it is someone who thinks that the photo that comes out of the camera is the final version and that nothing should be done to make it look like what your eyes saw. Sometimes it is because they can’t believe something that happened, happened. Regardless, if you want the image to look like you saw it or how you imagined it to look, you have to edit. Shooting RAW gives you the most flexibility in the final edit, but you HAVE to edit a RAW file, because the camera doesn’t do it for you.

Here’s the typical comment. This was made on my Faces of the Dead image.

What edits did I make? Not many.

In this photo, I decreased the white balance, increased contrast via the contrast slider but also through the next four you see in the screenshot. I also boosted contrast using clarity, dehaze. I increased the unsaturated colors saturation, which is typical, and I actually did increase saturation. I usually leave it at 0 or decrease it by a few points, but the rain that was blowing sideways was causing the everything in the camera to look blah. This was a hard image to get to look normal.

In addition, I used three adjustment brushes. The first was a burn (darken) brush to darken the front of the waves that looked too bright and a I brought out the waves structure. The second was a dehaze brush on the cliff faces and the two “faces” on the right side. The last was a dodge brush on the three most prominent faces to make them stand out against the waves around them. You can see the brush strokes that I made below. They appear as reddish.

I dodged the faces to make them just a bit brighter. It was a +0.25 brush.

I used +17 dehaze to make the two faces on the right and the cliffs pop out a bit more.

I used a -.30 exposure burn brush to darken the waves and a +26 clarity to bring out the wave’s structure.

One of the reason that I think people questions photos like this is that they don’t expect to see faces or other objects in random areas, but because our minds are subject to pareidolia we tend to see faces or other objects in pictures and assume that the photographer put those there. Or they might never have witnessed a rare event and because of that are more likely to assume that a rare event caught on camera must be fake. Or, because there are so many fake photos out there — several showing Mars as big as the Moon in the sky come to mind.

But strange and random shapes that trigger pareidolia occur in nature and in waves they occur often, and if you have your finger on the trigger shooting at eight frames for second, there’s a good chance that in one of those shots over the length of the splash you’ll get something that causes someone to see something. For example, the Spirit Elk in the shot below.

Or sometimes, something extremely rare happens. The following photo had dozens of people saying that I faked the shot. In reality, I was driving to shoot this scene at another location when we saw the two ships coming in. I wasn’t where I wanted to be to get the shot, but I stopped and took it anyway. Then people said I faked it. They said that two ships would never come under the lift bridge at the “same” time. And then they tried to prove it with time stamps they got from the lift bridge or something like that and then tried to prove it via the size of the ships by saying one looked too big or something. On the time issue, the lift bridge had recorded the times wrong and they adjusted their time stamps after another photographer showed a timelapse video of the event. I’m sure the person operating the lift bridge remembered it, because it is rare. But, it does happen now and then. I was in the right place at the right time.

Photography is all about being in the right place at the right time and shooting a lot of shots just so you can get the exact perfect one you want. If you are willing to put in the time, you don’t need to “fake” anything. Rare events happen. You’ll capture them and then other folks will wonder how you always seem to get the shot. It’s all about putting in the time.