Doug McMillend, an awesome amateur photographer based in Decatur, Ga, sent an email to my job (Creative Loafing) asking where we’d gotten our Urban Explorer placeholder icon from, as it looks eerily similar to his photograph of the Downtown Atlanta Skyline.
He said he didn’t mean to imply that they’re the same, but he just wanted to know where the image came from.
As an amateur photographer myself, I decided to break the two photographs down to see if I could deduce whether they are one and the same.
First, I took Doug’s photo and cropped it to an area with the same dimensions as our UrBex placeholder (150px by 168px). Second, I had to manually change the aspect ratio of Doug’s photo (changing the horizontal scale while keeping the vertical scale the same) to fit all the buildings that you can see in our placeholder image.
(I also don’t have the original image we used for our placeholder thumbnail).
Third, I tried to adjust levels, colors, saturation, hue, etc, on Doug’s photograph to try and match the same colors on ours. I couldn’t. You see, the difference in temperature is natural due to the time of day that the two photographs were taken.
How could I tell? Well, Doug’s photograph was taken at a later time at dusk, thus the darker shade in the sky; he also used a faster shutter and/or smaller aperture. The streaks of light are distinct in his image, you could almost count each one of them.
The streaks of light on our thumbnail are more blurry, the shadows are not as intense, and the reflections of the lamplights are not as defined as they are on Doug’s shot.
Yes, very similar photographs; that is a favorite location for many photographers to take the same style of image, but these two are not one and the same.
Needless to say, I did not take either of the two shots. Our shot came from istockphoto.com.
One Comment
This is Doug, the photographer of one of the shots in question.
Thanks for being curious, and taking the time to investigate further. When you mentioned that you bought it from iStock, I actually knew it was okay. I came across the photo on iStock a few months ago, stunned that it was almost identical to mine (as was another silhouette of the city similar, though that one more different). So I spent time looking at it in detail like you did, and came to the same conclusion. Despite it showing up on iStock 2 weeks after I posted mine on Flickr, it was definitely a different photo, for many of the reasons you outlined.
Just a popular location with almost identical timing and lighting…almost.
Doug