Awesome Pic

[Phil Lilley]

Sent by a friend.

[Randall]

how'd they get that? i'm impressed.

[Don]

I received the same picture via email about a week ago. The following is the comment that was attached to it:

Awesome.... nighttime photo of lightning and tornado This is a spectacular "Night" picture of the tornado that went thru portions of Sedalia, MO on March 10, 2006. If it hadn't been for the lightning at the same time as the pic was shot, you would never have seen the massive tornado funnel already on the ground. When you hear a nighttime tornado warning for your area, take cover because most of the time you will never see it coming.

This won't happen again for a long, long time.

[MTM]

WOW! Ron

[ecce38]

I received the same picture via email about a week ago. The following is the comment that was attached to it:

Awesome.... nighttime photo of lightning and tornado This is a spectacular "Night" picture of the tornado that went thru portions of Sedalia, MO on March 10, 2006. If it hadn't been for the lightning at the same time as the pic was shot, you would never have seen the massive tornado funnel already on the ground....

This won't happen again for a long, long time.

Maybe I've seen too many reruns of the 'Wizard of Oz' but notice that all the trees are perfectly focused. Your F-stop would have to be wide open with a slow shutter speed to boot just to get any sort of image in these conditions. Also, when the lightening occurred, parts would have been over exposured. I've taken numerous photos on sunny, mildly windy days and to obtain the level of focus you see here in such extreme conditions makes me wonder about the validity of this picture. Moreover, if the statement in red is true, I find it even more incredible to believe this is a real photograph, and not something that has been "photoshopped" to a very large extent. Think about it. To not only snap the photo at the same time as the lightening strike but to have the funnel cloud nicely centered in the photo and not even knowing it was there in the first place? Photographically speaking, this is would have to be the most perfectly timed picture ever taken! Am I the sole skeptic here? Maybe I am. If I'm wrong, I want to meet the person who took this and rub their head so I can win the next lottery!

[Phil Lilley]

I thought the same thing... but how did they get the perfect lighting of the clouds and funnel? Not sure if you can fake this.

What's the name of the site you can check for spoofs?

[Rusty]

The craigslist. haha From what I have been hearing, you can find a lot of things there lately.

Is it snopes.com?

It is.

[Rusty]

It's an authentic photo according to snopes.

[ecce38]

I thought the same thing... but how did they get the perfect lighting of the clouds and funnel? Not sure if you can fake this.

Phil, if someone is shooting in RAW format, the post processing one can do is remarkable. I've read on lots of photography message boards about how doing post processing is like cheating. For example, in jpeg format, the dynamic range (shades of color) is 256. In RAW, it's about 4,000, so there's lots to work with in this format. Trust me, photos can be "faked" in all sorts of ways.

It's an authentic photo according to snopes.

Wow, just wow! What more can one say about it?

[Kansas Fly Fisher]

Now that's a fantastic photo! I'll have to keep a copy of this for my files.

John