"G.R. Patterson III" wrote in message
...
There is no shadow.

Yes, there is. The fuselage shadow runs along the top of the crest of the
road.
Shadows of the wings and tail extend into the green field behind the
plane. From the
angle of the wing shadow on the side of the fuselage, the ground shadows
are where
one would expect them to be.

I disgree. The sun appears to be high and slightly to the left, nearly
directly overhead. The dark areas at the crest of the road and in the field
are something other than the shadow of the airplane.

However, that said...there's nothing about the photo that suggests it's a
fake.

* the fence to the left is consistent with an airport boundary,
* it's not unusual to see landing aircraft at that altitude that close
to a runway,
* the shadow of the airplane would be out of the frame, beyond the
bottom edge,
* the so-called "motion blur" of the cars is actually apparent on all
objects in the frame except the aircraft which suggests that the camera was
being panned to follow the airplane (a very common photographic technique,
and given the bright scene would result in the very minimal blurring seen
for the non-subject elements of the frame), and
* the so-called aliasing around the airplane is simply a combination of
JPEG artifacts and the consequence of having shrunk the image (they are
practically nonexistent in the larger version of the image)

As far as the question of whether it IS a fake or not, who can tell? It's a
digital photo, and you never can really know for sure (absent authentication
techniques for creating certifiable photos, of course). Some fakes are very
good. If this is a fake, it's one of the very good ones. But one should
ask themselves, why would anyone bother faking a photograph like this? It
would be easy enough to get an actual photograph, and there's no profit in
faking one.

I do think that if someone wants to be a photo detective (as Peter R.
says...everyone wants to be one these days ), they ought to learn more
about photography and digital images. Playing Sherlock works a lot better
if the "clues" one discovers are actually valid clues.

Pete