I don't know how tall this POI is but I believe he is taller than the 5'3"-5'4" as the road does not seem level with the pool, it appears to me at least that the pool is slightly higher than the road.....I don't believe he would be real tall, perhaps 5'7" to 5'10".....the shoes have always gotten to me.....I have never been able to see the things that others say is in the picture until they mention it....His gait seems exaggerated to me, like he is really having to push himself to make steps that long.....
There are two cameras, one that recorded the entrance the car was driven in to and one that recorded the pool gate the POI walked by.
I don't know anything about the entrance video. I was not able to see anything in the darkness of it back when it was a link on a newspaper site. But plenty of people have had plenty to say about it through the years, and I don't recall anyone saying that the walk from the car around the pool looked like anything that people use to describe his walk a few steps later by the pool gate.
Now camera two looking at the pool gate I have some understanding of, but not nearly enough. No one saw fit to inform the public what model camera it was and what the settings were, for had they done that, I would have recreated some images to find what real world visuals look like those images. The Orlando Police said don't worry about the pictures, and of course most everyone hasn't.
I did some research back when I was analyzing these stills in 2007. I documented what I found then and through the years there is discussion here and I occasionally do some more searches and occasionally I write some more on it. I don't know that I know anything more than I did then but sometimes I may end up describing a little different. Maybe sometimes that helps, maybe it doesn't.
This is a cheap night time capable surveillance camera, I think no one will dispute that it isn't high quality. But not high quality doesn't mean it is useless. It means people have to understand the limitations and their effect on the images.
1. InfraRed for night time viewing not filtered out in daytime. From my research cheap cameras either had no filter or the mechanism to flip the filter on during daylight and off at night wasn't working. Probably no filter. This washed out images during the day. I posted side by side comparisons a few pages back. The Orlando Police saw their own uniforms washed out when they looked at the camera. Everyone should have known that looking at the images and thinking they were seeing painters and line cooks was not true. They could just as easily been looking at security uniforms, which my analysis says they were.
2. Motion blur - Cheap cameras recorded to VCR, but not frame for frame in real life. A VCR or any kind of storage would fill up quickly. From my research surveillance cameras had settings to limit the captures, the longer the setting the more condensed the storage. My guess is that the setting was a frame possibly every 1.5 seconds or so. We see this in having three frames as the POI walks by the gate. We can guess what the time lapse is for example from still 1 to still 2 in front of the gate, and then still 2 to still 3 by the palm tree.
But... there is not a snapshot every 1.5 seconds. That was for more expensive cameras. The lens captured continuously during that time, and then the shutter closed or whatever surveillance cameras do to take a frame. Continuously means something moving is seen for 1.5 seconds in the still image. It means it started at one point and ended at another during that time. Basically that's a type of blur distortion. This may have some effect on the shoes, but not that I can see. There are some other artifacts in the images that do look like they were taken at different times though.
3. Lens distortion. The shoes has the look of lens distortion to me, that is outside of a focus area the picture is distorted. The legs appear longer to me and the shoes larger in proportion. Looking at the images, doesn't the parked car seem larger that one would expect compared to his head and upper body? That would be the same distortion applied to the upper part of the picture higher than his head, which in still 2 is about the center of image.
As usual, I welcome any input from people more familiar with the technology who might have some insights. In this particular post there is nothing involving enlarging and otherwise enhancing the brightness / contrast of the images, just discussing the original surveillance camera stills. My only insights came from research which others may be able to shed more light on.
And we need more light.
