Understanding how motion and enlargement can distort photos
The SamCait conspiracy theorists (CTs) count on the average fan not to know much about photography or photo manipulation. Without really understanding these things, their arguments (especially accompanied by important looking arrows) can seem convincing when they claim that a photo is a manip.
A number of people in the fandom assumed the Sam handholding photo was a manip because the clasped hands detail, when enlarged, looked strange, blurry, and to some, not even “human.”
Unfortunately, lots of people in the fandom don’t seem to understand that if you take a photo with a camera phone and you greatly enlarge a detail, the detail is going to be very fuzzy. And then if you add motion to the mix, parts of it are not going to “look human,” especially if you take a photo at the wrong moment.
Let me illustrate this with this gif of Cait from the 2015 Alexa photoshoots:
Now the gif above is clearly recognizable as a woman (although the curly hair is hiding Cait’s face a bit, so you might not realize that it is Cait). The quality of the gif isn’t great but that is okay given that we are talking about what happens when motion and enlargement are applied to poor quality photos.
I split this gif into frames because when someone takes a photo of someone who is moving they are essentially taking one “frame.” So let’s look at one of the frames from the above gif to see how motion can distort the frame.
In the frame below we can certainly see some distortion in both Cait’s hands and her lower left arm.
Below the frame is enlarged by using a scale image tool:
[Note. The enlargement can only be seen on the web version of this post, not the mobile version.]
Even though the tool tries to correct the number of pixels in the enlargement so they are proportional to the original, an enlarged frame is still going to be fuzzier than the original frame. Look at Cait’s right hand, it looks even more like a club in the enlarged photo. Her left arm looks ridiculously skinny. The fingers on both hands basically disappear and her hands look like stubs.
Let’s look at one more frame from the gif:
Again, motion distorts both hands and the lower half of Cait’s left arm.
The distortion is even more pronounced in the enlarged frame above. [Note. The enlargement can only be seen on the web version of this post, not the mobile version.] Certainly Cait’s left hand and lower left arm don’t look “human.”
That’s what happens when a still photo of a moving subject is enlarged from a low quality photo/ frame.
This brings us back to the Sam handholding photo. When we see the photo at a normal size, the hands look like “human hands.”
But when we enlarge the detail (and sharpen it--the photo below was definitely sharpened) it looks a lot stranger:
Sam’s thumb in particular looks very strange because it is in motion.
All the distortion can be attributed to using a camera phone to take a photo of subjects that are in motion, and then enlarging a detail.
I’ve taken the time to demonstrate this because the SamCait CT’s are constantly claiming that photos are manipulated. If you don’t understand certain principles, you can be easily fooled by their claims.
[edited]