I received an e-mail last week about a massive mastiff noted in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the world’s largest dog. There was a photo accompanying the email and, sure enough, said pooch is depicted walking alongside its master. The dog is definitely out of proportion, and, on closer look, we can take note of a few issues with the image that makes its veracity questionable.
First: what’s with the dog’s hind legs? Given the presence of the right back paw shown just “under” the right forepaw, the leg it should be attached to is missing.
Second: The dog’s shadow is incorrect. Compare it with the shadow of the horse, and we’ll note that the angle of the light would create a cast shadow of the dog’s legs just as it’s doing with the horse’s legs. However, we see that the shadow cast by the dog is hanging close and is too elliptical to represent the shape of the dog. And, there’s no shadow attached to that unseen hind leg.
Third: proportions don’t work. Proportion (relative size) is an aesthetic principle in which the size of something is measured against something else or against an established standard. For something to be believable it must make sense. Proportion is one way to achieve a believable illusion: the size of something is related to the size of something else. The dog is too big in proportion to the horse (which, by the way, is a fairly small horse
I checked out this story and photo on Truth or Fiction, and found it to be “almost” true. The world’s largest dog, according to the Guinness folks, is an English Mastiff named (appropriately) Hercules that weighs about 282 pounds. The dog in the photo can’t be Hercules: it’s not an English Mastiff and it would weigh in at about 500 pounds, if we compare its size in relation (proportion) to the horse.
Well, at least the lighting in the photo is consistent in angle, which is usually a problem with composited images such as this one.
We can draw the conclusion from this that we cannot believe everything we see. We live in an age in which it is a simple and common thing to modify a image. A photo is no longer proof of anything.
