SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - There have been a number of questions surrounding a picture of Susan Powell and her family since it first surfaced on an anonymous website earlier this month. Among those questions, is it legitimate?
The picture on
www.susanpowell.org shows Susan, Josh and their two boys posing in front of a large fire. Their campground is covered in snow and it is night.
The photo seems to bolster the alibi of Josh Powell. Late on the night his wife disappeared, he said he took the two boys camping in the snow near Simpson Springs. Clearly the picture was not taken on the night she disappeared, still it seems to say, "Hey, we did this all the time and loved it."
Bloggers and posters on the web speculate the photo could have been faked. They point to the fire that seems somehow out of perspective, the lack of shadows and the "cut out" appearance of the family.
ABC 4 took action to get a professional opinion from Mark Throckmorton, an artist who is also trained to detect photographic fakery.
First, he looked at the fire. By changing the color values, he looked for evidence the fire's light was reflected in the surrounding snow. Throckmorton said, "I just ran it through a couple of filters. You can see the light from the fire is there. It's consistent. I popped it a little bit so you can see it's reflecting. It's genuinely in the photograph." He also noted that while one of the boys and Susan are looking into the camera, the other boy and his dad appear to be looking at the fire.
Then, he looked at the shadows. "The flash of the camera is going to take away a lot of the extreme shadows," he said. "There's no cloning going on that I can tell."
Finally, Throckmorton took a look at the edge of the green cap of one of the boys. There's an odd color shift around it, a few pixels of a halo that could indicate "masking" - a technique used to superimpose a object onto a scene. "It is possible there may have been something - that's only a maybe at best." Throckmorton said it is possible for a good fake to show no masking.
Still, the results of his investigation: "There's nothing in there that shows any sign of manipulating. It's consistent throughout. I think it's a genuine photo."
To be sure, Throckmorton would like to see the original file. Photos are typically reduced in size and resolution before posting to the web. Such a reduction could make photographic fakery harder to detect.
But seeing the original photo may be difficult considering the website where it's posted is anonymous. There is nothing on the site that indicates who is responsible for its contents.
