Ah – yes! Thanks, Glurk – I remember it now. The gentleman in question was very aggressively pushing his theory, as I recall it.

Strange indeed to form such theories based on – as you indicate – image files of dubious quality.

OK. So maybe I was too kind to old Matthew.

Say what you will about his work but the drawings are stunning and exquisite. I don’t know about the evidentiary value of this stuff but if he were offering framed prints I’d be interested, LOL.

Well, I guess that where some people see "stunning and exquisite," other people, like myself, see total and utter crap. A good deal of what he was "seeing" wasn’t even anything that was IN the actual images anyway, it was compression artifacts from bad resizing of the (already lossy to start with) JPEG images.

For those of you who may know – is this the same guy who was active on Butterfield’s forum some years ago? Or was that a different "hidden faces in the letters" character?

Um no, that was someone different. Dr. Larry D’Antonio, who promised a book called "The Artwork of the Zodiac Killer: The Evidence that was Missed." The book never appeared, but a short article about it is here:

http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Lawrence-D%27 … 1347917891

Dr. D’Antonio wasn’t using a mirror (that I know of) but was recording his LCD computer screen with a camcorder, and also doing something or other with silly putty.

-glurk

I think they were both from AZ. Maybe it’s contagious.

Well, I guess that where some people see "stunning and exquisite," other people, like myself, see total and utter crap.
-glurk

Didn’t like it mate?

I have to wonder if Matthew and "Heward T Miller" are the same person.

https://twitter.com/iidZodiacKiller

http://zodiackillerletterproject.wordpress.com/

Heward generates much of the same kind of pareidolia nonsense, presenting his bizarre art projects as some sort of solution to the Zodiac case. In his blog he mentions that he has over 200,000 images, which is similar to a claim made by Matthew.

And they both seem similar to Dr. Larry D’Antonio. I suppose it’s possible that there are three different people sharing the same delusion.

I think that one of the major problems with this sort of thing is the lack of understanding by many people of how digital imaging works. Certainly, the people doing this "stuff" don’t understand it, and many of the people looking at it don’t either.

JPEG images, in particular, use "lossy compression" which means that the image is, at best, a best-effort reproduction of the original. And of course there are different levels of compression. There do exist lossless image types, and the RAW mode on modern digital cameras captures exactly what the CCD sensor "sees" but that never seems to be the case with this "stuff."

You cannot zoom in on a JPEG and get "more detail." You will just start seeing the compression artifacts more and more. And you SURE AS HELL cannot take photos of a computer monitor to "enhance" an image. All that is doing is adding even more blur/distortion/etc.

Some of the people doing this "work" seem to think that digital images and cameras are like an electron microscope or something, as if you zoom in enough you can start to see the atomic structure of things, LOL. It doesn’t work that way. At all.

And then, after they introduce all of this deformity to the original image, they start seeing "faces" or other things in them.

It would almost be funny, if it weren’t so damned pitiful.

-glurk

But when they zoom in on images in CSI programs, they always find the bad guys hiding back there in the little pixel things.
I’ve seen it on TV.

Yeah and when it’s mirrored you can 2 or 4 bad guys for the price of 1.

Let’s enhance!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhF_56SxrGk

All the tech guys can all type really well too – and super fast. That always impresses me.