Object in a picture taken at Machu Picchu!

I was looking at some great picture taken of Machu Picchu today spotted an object in the distance in one of the snaps! I dont claim it to be a UFO and is probably just a bird or insect.

I have made this thread just in case any expert ATS' ers can find out what it could actually be!

The pics are courtesy of this site Love these pics

Here's the link to the photo's i'm talking about and you need to scroll down to picture 15

Macchu Picchu

Worth a look just to view the photo's.

Thanks in advance,

Albert.

reply to post by albertfothergill


Considering that there is a bird in the photo....I'm going to guess that the object in the background is also a bird.

reply to post by isyeye


Thanks for your reply, but as i said in my OP, I was hoping if any experts could have a look, maybe analyse the photo with relevant software.

Al

reply to post by isyeye


well thats the 1st thing i thought but when you zoom in,it looks like its a different story! ?

reply to post by meremortal


Here's a zoomed in picture of the object in question for everyone.

I'm still thinking it's a bird.

reply to post by isyeye


Looks like a fish.

reply to post by isyeye


Thanks for that isyeye!

could be a bird after an insect, or another bird. Even experts would need the raw photo image data.

I think it is a photoshop hoax. Or just another bird. It does seem very large in the distance.

Here is it zoomed in a bit, it is strange how the pic seems more pixelated around the object. Everywhere else around it is smooth looking. Immediately around it though, looks "manipulated".

*edit* when I was posting this, the post above me was not up yet. Sorry for posting a zoomed pic again.

reply to post by albertfothergill


Considering a lot of Bird Watchers go to Machu Picchu, I'm going with bird as well.

Machu Picchu Bird Watching Guide

More photos of birds at Machu Picchu

Another photo source

reply to post by albertfothergill


there you go i think its of great interest well at least to me

reply to post by isyeye


so if there was a car in the photo would that make it a car in the distance
i think not .
its no bird to me but thats my opinion

reply to post by isyeye


yes i saw the zoomed in pic, that is not a bird! oh it must be a plane silly me

this is like national geographic pics, innocently taken ,why would they photo shop?

To me it looks like a skydiving bird like a hawk. When these birds skydive they put their wings close to their torso to get maximum free fall.

reply to post by dollukka


thank you Dollukka best explanation yet!

reply to post by mcx1942


When you zoom in on the bird in the foreground, around the moving wings tips you also see the same pixellation.
I would say it looks like a bird, can even see a light patch at the left hand edge like the light part at the back of the bird in the foreground.

Originally posted by isyeye
reply to post by albertfothergill

 

Considering that there is a bird in the photo....I'm going to guess that the object in the background is also a bird.

edit on 26-11-2012 by isyeye because: (no reason given)

That's a silly guess.

If there WAS no bird in the picture, would you still assume it's a bird?

If not, you need to analyze your thinking abilities.

If I caught a dog in my photo, and also had a cat in it too, would you say "Oh there is a cat in that photo, I'm going to assume that other thing is also a cat."

You wouldn't, because that would be stupid, now wouldn't it?

It's a bird in free fall for sure. Awesome photos though....and amazing location. Would love to visit some day.

Originally posted by mcx1942
I think it is a photoshop hoax. Or just another bird. It does seem very large in the distance.

Here is it zoomed in a bit, it is strange how the pic seems more pixelated around the object. Everywhere else around it is smooth looking. Immediately around it though, looks "manipulated".

This pixelisation is caused by the JPEG compression and can be found around every highly contrasted areas in a JPEG photo.

Three kinds of distortions

JPEG tends to introduce two three kinds of distortions:

general loss of sharpness and oscillations around high-contrast edges: these are due to approximating intensity transitions with smooth functions (cosines); you see them as small "dots" or "halos" around the edges; they are particularly easy to see in the images of text of hand-drawings.
blocking structure: image is processed separately for every 8x8 block (or bigger in case of chroma downsampling), block edges become visible at high compression ratios.
loss of color detail: it depends on saving parameters, the program may aggressively "downsample" (reduce resolution of) chromaticity channels; it is rarely an issue for the natural photography.

Visible block structure and halos around edges are usually referred to as JPEG artifacts. Let's zoom in our example to see them better. From left to right, a crop from the original, JPEG Q80 and JPEG Q30 images. I marked artifacts in green (circles for halos, and dots for 8x8 blocks):

Source

As OP's photo is not original, it was very likely resized thus the JPEG compression artefacts.

About the photo itself, it was so badly modified that the EXIF don't even show the camera model:



I'm afraid that nothing useful can be done on this photo, any serious and complete image analysis require the full unmodified document.

Probably a bird, but just a guess...

Originally posted by CthulhuMythos
reply to post by mcx1942

 

When you zoom in on the bird in the foreground, around the moving wings tips you also see the same pixellation.
I would say it looks like a bird, can even see a light patch at the left hand edge like the light part at the back of the bird in the foreground.

Indeed, good catch. I did not think of checking out the bird in the foreground. Doh!

Thank you friend.