Bigfoot Faces in the Dark: part 2

Last time I started talk about the differences between digital imagery and celluloid or film imagery, and why digital evidence can be a bad thing in your hunt for Bigfoot. When you take a picture with an old style film camera, what you see is what you get, but in a digital camera, you get oh so much more.

Older cameras rely entirely on optics for an image, but newer digital cameras actually have software that can enhance what you see. That is pretty cool, but the drawback is that it can lead you to believe that something is there, when it isn't. Take this picture I posted last time for instance.

 

 

This is a bit blurry, but understandable when you consider how enlarged it is from the original shot. It is a shot taken from a long distance of an area where I though I could sense something. I could not see anything with the naked eye, so I looked through my camera's viewfinder. I could see what I thought was a whatever, but when I got over to the place I took the photo of, there was nothing there. Naturally. Happens all the time in Bigfooting.

 

So, as we all do, I took a closer look at home, and upon examining it thoroughly, declared this to be an image of a medieval soldier. Yah, right. A medieval in the backwoods of 21st century Maine. Take a look at this image with the requisite redlines and all.

 

 

It kinda does look like a helmeted foot soldier with a pike and all. Was it really there? Of course not. However, the old adage states that the camera doesn't lie. That might have been true in the old days, but not any more. Today's digital camera's are expert liars.

Software manufacturers need to sell software, and so they develop software to sell to camera manufacturers who also need to sell cameras. And the cameras that sell, are also the cameras that people want. And people want cameras that take great pictures, without a lot of work going into the effort on their part.

Of course,  I'm talking about consumer grade cameras here, not the higher end prosumer and pro models. These would be the DSLR's and other cameras that capture images digitally, but use high quality optics for visual targeting and focusing.

Here is the problem with today's digital cameras and why so many people can see a Bigfoot that isn't; facial recognition software. Now, I have posted this fact on several forums with a lot of negative feedback from many of the members of those forum members. The fact is, sadly, that many people would rather comfortably rest on a lie as opposed to putting some hard labor into the truth.  The facial recognition software that is in these cameras, is not the same the facial recognition software that governments use to keep tabs on us.

Nevertheless, the detractors of my point don't care about facts, so to them I say; have a good day, and goodbye. To the rest of the community, I say; take a moment and learn something new. Here is how this software works: The software contains a set of predetermined parameters that are programmed to read various signals that may indicate the features of a persons face. Then it directs the cameras focusing mechanism to focus in on that specific point of the image to develop that perceived facial feature, while ignoring the rest of the image.

In a nutshell, if a set of shadows and highlights fall together in the right pattern, your camera will show you what it thinks is a person. It doesn't matter if there is a person there or not, what matters is if the camera thinks there is a person. My advice to you is that if you really want to take pictures of Bigfoot, if your camera has this facial recognition ability, try to turn it off.

Usually, this is a basic component of the autofocus function, and you will need to disable it. However, many cameras today also have various preset settings that you can also use that will disable this facial recognition software, such as scenic view or distant view. There are many names for these various settings, and the autofocus parameters will give you a different focus perspective, but at least you will not be seeing Bigfoot faces in the shadows. Maybe.

There are some other aspects that also need to be covered here, such as the terms pareidolia and simulacra, and we'll get into these phenomenon next time.