An immaculate, perfectly safe electrical installation...

[dennis]

From the way the wires fade out I would say its a photoshop job.

[John Rumm]

The EXIF information indicates it came from a Ricoh camera in 2005 - a trip through photoshop would normally strip that.

[dennis]

Its easy enough to put exif info in, its not exactly intended to be a security key.

[Sam Plusnet]

Try saying "Little old Lady got mutilated late last night" quickly - and make it sound easy.

[Tim Watts]

I've seen enough photos from India to believe this could be credible...

[Jules Richardson]

If you mean the overhead wires, then if you piss about with the levels the information's mostly there - I think it may just be the way light is hitting them. I'm not certain about the red/yellow/blue wires though; some of the edges look a little suspect.

If it is a fake then it's been done pretty well - and given some of the other 'street level' wiring photos I've seen it could well be genuine.

cheers

Jules

[Andy Burns]

Could just be over exposure in that area.

I doubt a jpg straight from a camera would have an alpha channel, this one does, which would be dead handy if you wanted to shoop it!

The dodgy bits are where a blue wire passes by the left shoulder of the bloke in the shop, and a red wire in front of his right shoulder, shadow and reflection angles seem inconsistent too.

I suspect the pole exists in that condition, but nowhere near those shops, and maybe not so close to the ground.

[Huge]

Me too. And I took some of them.

[Nige Danton]

What are the grey horizontal stripes behind the seated man but in front of the blue cable?

[Andy Champ]

And in the top right corner there are three wires leading out of picture. At least, one of them leads out of picture, the other two fade out of existence. And the three that lead over the telephone sign seem transparent in spots.

The base of the RH pole is clearly in sunlight, and the shadow matches the shadows in the background. Why aren't there any sings of sunlight on the transformer or wires?

Must have taken along time to do.

Andy

[tony sayer]

You should get out more Den, to India perhaps?.

And don't forget to take your Brownie box;)...

[John Rumm]

The left most of them is there - but mostly lost in jpeg artefacts - if you play with the contrast and brightness enough you can see the track of the wire. The right most of them is simply "burnt out" (in photographic terms rather than electrical).

There is.. Look at the yellow wire just below the bottom right hand edge of the transformer - near the red printed notice. The sheath of that is clearly in inlight. As is the right hand side of the big grey cable that passes under it from left to right then drops down. The same is true for the large grey cables that loop around on the lsft of the picture.

I can't see any evidence of it being altered.

More to the point, why would you suspect its altered? There are plenty of similar photos about that show similar installations - in fact its remarkably similar in many respects to substation photo of Lobster's that he posted earlier. e.g.:

[Dave Liquorice]

I'm not convinced about the red wire where is crosses over the seated mans white clothing and the blue wire seems very translucent to the left of his ear.

The sunlight thing, weel the sun is not onto the face we can see it's slighly behind. The face of the righthand leg is not sun lit.

Oh just spotted something else a bit strange. The first red wire from the left where it disappears behind the blue doesn't seem quite right and there is a similar red spoldge nesr the right arm of the chair. That could be the jpeg compression and the moire patterning from the detail of the chair back having an argument though.

TBH I wouldn't be at all surprised at it being genuine.

[John Rumm]

Its not helped by the wires themselves being dirty in places. The main difficulty is there is so much JPEG compression that you are losing much of the detail.

There is an equal measure of green as well though, and it occupies a number of compression cells in that area.

It hardly seems extreme enough to make it worth faking.

[dennis]

The top of the building is all washed out too, and it looks like it should be in shadow. Maybe its a triangular building?

People fake stuff like that just to say they can.

[Lobster]

David

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Why the f*ck would anyone bother? To show the dangerous state of electrical sub-stations in some parts of the world? Simply not worth the trouble, as thousands of undoctored photographs attest to it.

[tony sayer]

Indeed why would anyone bother to fake what's all too gen in countries like that. Parts of Africa aren't that different .. where they have got power that is; !...

[tony sayer]

Dennis.. Go out on a bright day and take some pix of wires up in the sky and see how they do fade out. Or go on Google maps and using the map viewer look up in most areas and see power and phone lines disappear against the brighter sky...

[dennis]

They don't fade out like that on any pictures I take, well not unless I want them to. Its not as though the wires go off into the sun as can be seen by the shadows.