The REAL Hogzilla!....(link)

[hexidismal]

I'd like to take a minute here to address all the comments of how these images are "so clearly" photoshop work. This line of discussion interests me, as knowing and understanding the makeup of digital images is something I do as part of my living, and so I'd like to share my thoughts with you. I'd like to use two specific graphic images as comparison. First I'd like to show you an image which is real. Rather than glut up the thread, I'll provide a link. I do not know where this image originates from, only that it was linked to on the THR forum in a post on the duplicate thread over there. Here is the first pic, you'll be referring back to this one.
http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m...r/IMG_2189.jpg
Now, thats a big pig ! Do you think that image is a photoshop work ? Think again.
Ok, what makes me think that ? Some of you no doubt are familiar with exif data, and some of you I'm sure are not. So let me explain that as quickly as possible. Exif data is info hidden inside a digital photograph. It can be easily accessed with many programs, but understanding it all is another thing entirely. All cameras (and photoshop) leave behind a digital trail in the data, and this can tell us a lot of things. One important thing to note is that exif data can be modified and faked. IF one has all the appropriate data relevant to a specific camera it can be done, but it would be tedious.
Now, I'm not going to give a ton of examples here as to the how and why, but I am MOSTLY satisfied that this particular image is direct unaltered JPG upload from a Canon A75. (And to other graphics people, no I'm not just looking at the camera name.. I'm quite qualified to interpret all exif data). But why do I say I'm only MOSTLY convinced ? Well, that's interesting. See, the exif data has a slight anomaly when compared to this next image, which was taken(according to the data), with the same model camera just under 3 minutes later. Same model, and a near number label would of course lead one to believe it's the same camera used.: http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m...r/IMG_2196.jpg : Which would of course make sense. The problem ? I don't have a access to a canon A75 (actually if anyone is interested to play detective, and does have one, PM me) The aforementioned anomaly MIGHT lead me to believe that it was a different camera of the same model, or perhaps a different memory module, but could just as easily be an automatic setting variable. Everything else is consistent with being perfectly real and unaltered. I only mentioned the anomaly as a possible, though highly unlikely, sign of exif tampering.
Wow.. this is getting really long .. still with me people ? Anyway , in the first pic, I'll just keep it short and say I can find no evidence of digital manipulation. So, what I'm saying here folks, is if that first picture was altered, it is VERY GOOD WORK. Which is NOT consistent with the monsterpig.com photo . Moving on ...

To the monsterpig.com photo. The image in question, that most of you are referring to:
http://www.monsterpig.com/betterespigpic.jpg
You're correct, not real. It is both a forced perspective shot, and a digital manipulation. I can't use exif data as an example, because the data would have been altered to to include the site ad logo. You don't need to crunch the numbers though, the manipulation is so lax it easily seen. I've prepared a very rough image with some examples.

Well, be using the first image as a comparison here. They were shot at slightly different angles, but close enough.
Where I say "break in continuity, in all fairness this could be caused by simple bad resizing technique, go to small then back to larger from there and you've lost a lot of data and you'll get some blocky non-continuous things.. so even though it's there , lets ignore it. Why ? Because we dont need it. Compare the first pic I posted again to this one, and you'll notice there are dark hanging branches in the real pic that start on the left side of the center tree, and none on the fake. It's too prominent to be total resize loss. Oops monsterpig, I caught you .. but lets go on. Although it is partially a forced perspective (the kid is farther back then you are led to believe), also he HAS been altered to be smaller in the pic. To the uninitiated, what I refer to as "healing marks and errors" are an example of a sloppy job of reconstructing the area that would otherwise be left blank when you try to resize only part of an image. One has to repeat pixels from another part of the image, and then blend them in effectively. Obviously whoever made the image thought that a bad job of resizing would damage enough data to cover up the bad work.. but it didn't.

Well, I cant believe I bothered to get into all this, and type all this out. But hopefully this was informative to you.
-hexidismal

[IM_Lugger]

To kill the massive beast, 16 shots were fired — all by Jamison. Approximately nine landed. They tracked — and sometimes were forced to avoid — the hog for more than three hours.

Booo. Why let 11year old do it esp. with a handgun? I read there were other people with ‘hi-power rifles’ in case the hog charges. So why not just use the rifle? Esp when they saw the handgun wasn’t effective... 9 shots??? 3.5 hours?? that’s just barbaric. :barf:



http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m...r/IMG_2189.jpg
so which one's the hog? lol

[Diggers]

LOL I was going to say the best evidence against is those two couldn't run through the woods for 3.5 hours.

About the rifle thing....... it was a guided hunt, the guides had the rifles just in case. But ya not exactly a clean kill there.

[joshua]

OH! Man! This is a good reason for .50 cal rifles kept legal to own in all states. josh

[FirstFreedom]

Thanks very much Hexi....

BUSTED - FAKE!

Get a life, losers (the perpetrators of monsterpig).

[dejr2000]

I've never heard of a "Guided hunt" where the guide wouldn't put the animal down after the first 1 or 2 shots weren't effective much less let it go on for 3 1/2 hours. Pretty poor sportsmanship and unethical in my opinion regardless of game.

[Glenn Bartley]

Wow.........

[Mike U.]

Thank you, Hexidismal!


I was hoping real hard a pro would step in and expose that pic.

As I look closely at the kid's elbow, I believe it shows a splinter of the thing he is leaning on also. Could be wrong on that one, but, it appears his elbow is resting on something not pig colored.

[oldironman]

Hexi, I followed that "untouched" photo back to here. It appears to be from the photo-bucket for the redheaded guide (owner?) that was in hunting group picture. The only picture missing from his bucket is the one that is "doctored". So it could be that his end wasn't responsible for it - not that it really matters all that much. Good bust!
http://s105.photobucket.com/albums/m211/Bigamhuntr/

And since no one else will say it, I think your jungle hunters are fake!

[Dannyboy303]

This was played on Australian TV last night... the story of this monster hog.

The first pic with just the boy and pig is a fake to catch your attention but the others look pretty real to me.
if the first pic was real the pig would weigh far more than 1000lbs

[joshua]

Even if the original picture was altered to gain attention, judging with the unaltered pic, "I say that there hog is still one big some a fa fitch!". Shoot! That boy and his day is some big uns too. josh

[rickomatic]

That chubby little kid looks pretty clean and tidy in his blue and white polo shirt, and white baseball cap, after having supposedly just chased that hog for 3-1/2 hours through some "hilly woods".
Gimme a break. If you're gonna fake a southern hunting photo, at least have the authenticity to put that little cherub in some camo and a little dirt or sweat on his face.
My money says it's somehow tied into promoting that new movie coming up. A real P.T. Barnum attempt if I ever saw one.
As Elaine Bennis once said on Seinfeld........."fake...fake...fake, fake, fake.."

[tydephan]

And now it appears as though the word is getting out...

The main story on Foxnews.com right now is how the photo could have possibly been altered...

Originally Posted by Foxnews.com

Photo of Monster Hog Called Into Question; Web Site Claims It Was Doctored
Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Is it a humongous hog, a monster mistake, or a huge hoax?

That's the question being asked Tuesday about a stunning photo distributed last Friday by the Associated Press that purports to show an 11-year-old Alabama boy standing behind a half-ton wild hog his father said he bagged with a pistol.

The boy, Jamison Stone, looks tiny in the photo as he stands behind his prize pig, which his father claims measures 9 feet 4 inches, and weighs 1,051 pounds.

"It feels really good," Jamison said last week in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "It's a good accomplishment. I probably won't ever kill anything else that big."

Jamison's father, Mike Stone, said the prize porker was hauled off on a truck to the Clay County Farmers Exchange in Lineville, where Jeff Kinder said they used his scale, recently calibrated, to weigh the hog, according to the Associated Press and a story published in the Anniston, Ala. Star newspaper.

Kinder's scale measures only to the nearest 10, but Stone said it balanced one notch past the 1,050-pound mark.

"It probably weighed 1,060 pounds. We were just afraid to change it once the story was out," he said.

But the photo — published on hundreds of Web sites, including FOXNews.com, and emailed millions of times — now is under attack from blogs and Web sites that claim to be able to prove that the boy and his father hammed it up for the photo, and that truth sometimes isn't in the eye of the beholder.

Jamison's father, Mike Stone, claims that the positioning in all six photographs displayed on their Web site MonsterPig.com, was unplanned, accidental, coincidental.

"These are authentic pictures," Stone told the Web site StinkyJournalism.com, which claims it can prove the colossol claim isn't kosher. "They have not been altered," Stone said.

Still, StinkyJournalism.com enlisted the help of a retired New York University physicist, Richard Brandt, who offers what he says is a "technical analysis" of the Stone family's claim.

The site also claims to have evidence that other photos on the family Web site were doctored to make the feral hog look bigger than life.

Jerry Cunningham, of Jerry’s Taxidermy in Oxford, Ala., who says he's mounting the head and skull, thinks otherwise.

“It’s probably the end of June before we’re through with it,” he said. "They’re about as twice as big as the normal pig. Five-hundred pounds is big, giant. Most of them that come in to be mounted are between 150 and 250."

Cunningham said the animal measured 54 inches around the head, 74 inches around the shoulders and 11 inches from the eyes to the end of its snout.

"It's huge," he said. "It's just the biggest thing I've ever seen."

Mike Stone, meanwhile, is having sausage made from the rest of the animal.

"We'll probably get 500 to 700 pounds," he told the Associated Press.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276216,00.html

[jimpeel]

BWAAAAHHHAHAHAHA!!! I love the caption on the attached photo "IS THIS PHOTO KOSHER?"

[oldbillthundercheif]

Ha!

I bet that's the most entertaining consulting gig that NYU physicist was ever called in on.

He went from calculating dark-matter mass in faraway galaxies to busting rednecks for fake pig photos.

Thanks for the breakdown, hexidecimal.

[IMTHDUKE]

http://www.al.com/newsflash/regional...st=alabamanews

[john in jax]

+1 on the canned hunt - - a 150 acre FENCED IN preserve! That is SMALL they'd hunt that empty in a few seasons with any pressure at all.

+1 on rank/tainted meat. Anybody see nuts on that pig in any of the photos? If that pig is the real deal the meat should be so tainted, so rank as to be inedible - - there would be no point in making sausage out of it. On the other hand if it was raised domestic and then purchased for a canned hunt and let go wild for a while then that would be some good sausage.

+1 this ain't right - - No businessman in his right mind would shun such positive publicity. If everything was on the up-and-up the fame/publicity of this giant pig would bring premium clients from around the world to hunt his plantation/preserve. Instead he is "tired" of answering questions about it.

[IMTHDUKE]

http://www.al.com/newsflash/regional...st=alabamanews

[DukeNukem]

According to this it was somebody's pet hog that escaped.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,277097,00.html

[Kreyzhorse]

FRUITHURST, Ala. - The huge hog that became known as "Monster Pig" after being killed by an 11-year-old boy had another name: Fred.

Far from feral, the pig had been raised on an Alabama farm and was sold to the Lost Creek Plantation just four days before it was shot there in a 150-acre fenced area, the animal's former owner said.

Phil Blissitt told The Anniston Star in a story Friday that he bought the 6-week-old pig in December 2004 as a Christmas gift for his wife, Rhonda, and that they sold it after deciding to get rid of all the pigs at their farm.

"I just wanted the truth to be told. That wasn't a wild pig," Rhonda Blissitt said.

Jamison Stone shot the huge hog during what he and his father described as a three-hour chase. They said it was more than 1,000 pounds and 9 feet long; if anything, it looked even bigger in a now-famous photo of the hunter and the hunted.

"We were told that it was a feral hog," Mike Stone told the Star, "and we hunted it on the pretense that it was a feral hog."

Telephone messages left Friday with Eddy Borden, the owner of Lost Creek Plantation, were not immediately returned.

The Blissitts said they didn't know the hog was Fred until they were contacted by a game warden for the Alabama Department of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries. The agency determined that no laws were violated in the hunt.

Phil Blissitt said he became irritated when he learned that some thought the photo of Fred was doctored.

"That was a big hog," he said.

Me thinks they all knew exactly what kind of hog this was prior to shooting it and posting it all over the internet. 15 minutes of fame is still 15 minutes of fame.

[IMTHDUKE]

It's Fred....It's Fred......Well, glad we are almost to the bottom of this. Now, don't ya'll be a goin out thar and killin Fred, no matter how big he is.

[Southern_guy]

I'd certainly like to find out what happened to the body.

[SavageSniper]

Ok maybe I missed it, but has anyone thought about an 11 year old boy shooting a SW 500 that many times? That thing is borderline field artillary. He would have to be tougher than the mythical hawg

[Scorch]

Jamison Stone shot the huge hog during what he and his father described as a three-hour chase

it was shot there in a 150-acre fenced area

"We were told that it was a feral hog," Mike Stone told the Star, "and we hunted it on the pretense that it was a feral hog."

Let's see if I can sort this out in my mind:
a 1,000 lbs hog, living in a 150-acre enclosure is a feral hog????
16 shots in a 3-hour period, the hog did not relocate to the next county, and they still thought it was a wild animal???

I guess the critics of the .500 S&W are right! The muzzle blast and recoil from that baby will stun you!

[Mike U.]

Yeah, that part about the kid pumping that much .500 S&W ammo downrange is kinda hard to swallow.
I'm sure most of ya'll have seen video of full grown, largish men shooting that revolver. The recoil shown by full bore .500 S&W loads is a tad initmidating.
I'm guessing the kid was shooting a somewhat watered down handload. This might also explain why it took the amount of ordinance it did to drop the poor pig.