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Paranormal Photography & EXIF Data on Digital Photos

   Using the EXIF information

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) was developed by Japan Electronic Industry Development Association (JEIDA) to be used by digital cameras. EXIF is a record of what kind of camera was used and its settings, which include exposure mode, aperture, flash, focal length, metering pattern, shutter speed, etc. EXIF files also store information on the current time and date, location (if camera has a GPS receiver) and copyright information. You might be asking yourself "Self, as a person involved in the paranormal why would I care about the EXIF information?" Then Self would say, "Because that is your negative for the photograph."

Perhaps the best way to discuss the EXIF information is to look at a couple photos. Here is a photograph that one of the members, Brian, of my group took before an investigation- notice what's playing.

Before you can look at the EXIF information stored with the image you need to have an EXIF viewer. There is no need to spend any money for one. There are lots of good ones out there that can actually be legally used for free. If you're a Firefox fan, one of the better ones is called Exif Viewer and for a stand alone application KUSO Exif Viewer and PhotoME are both very good programs. If you don't like any of those a simple internet search will give you many, many more choices. For the purpose of this newsletter I am going to be using KUSO for no other reason than I am to lazy to download anything else.

If you have chosen to use the KUSO viewer, after it is installed you can select on an image file, press down the right mouse button and pick on 'Open with KUSO EXIF Viewer'.

Once you open the file you will be given the list of information that is stored inside of the image.

The main information we are concerned with at the moment, is the section that contains the date information. (Well discuss the red circled areas a little later.)

You will notice that the 'create date', 'modify date' and the 'date time original' are all the same: 2009:05:1620:24:15. Which means the photo was taken on May 16, 2009 and 8:24pm. It also clearly shows that the image has never been altered. How do we know that the image has not been altered? That is because all three dates and times are exactly the same.

If we take the above image and make ANY changes to it, the EXIF information will be changed. Let's look at the altered image.

And the EXIF information from the altered image:

You can now see that the 'File Modify Date' is 2010:05:24 15:13. When this image is compared to the original image above clearly shows that this image has been edited. In my opinion ANY image that has had ANY manipulation MUST be thrown out as evidence.

A few extra points for you to remember; as I have stated any changes you make to an image will alter the EXIF information. It is a good practice to take the images directly from your cameras internal memory or flash card directly to your computer hard drive. Do not rename, adjust brightness, crop or do any thing to alter these originals. After these images are on your hard drive create a copy of them immediately to a backup device for archival. Once the archival is complete, make a copy the images on your hard drive. It is to these copies that you will make any adjustments too. That way you can brighten, crop, enlarge, etc with out every altering the original images.
What else can you do with the EXIF information? Take a look at the EXIF areas circled in red.

How many times have you seen a photo with streaks that people are claiming to be a ghost? Most of the time, ok 99.9% of the time, these streaks are nothing more than motion blur caused by a slow shutter speed. You can see from the chart below some suggested shutter speeds that are required to freeze motion.

Another very helpful use of this information is to prove orbs as false positives. The majority or orbs are caused by the flash of the camera bouncing off air born particles. With today's automatic cameras the flash will fire 'as required' based on the electronics in the camera. This leads to most people not having a clue if the flash fired or not. With the use of the EXIF information, this no longer needs to remain a mystery.

Hopefully this article was able to give you a basic understanding of the EXIF information and how it can become a helpful tool for your evidence review. If you ever need any help with a photograph, feel free to send me an email with the original image. Make sure it's the original, with help of the EXIF information I will know if it's not. ;)

 

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