Case of the day: can you tell what's in the frame?

A lantern slide, rounded at the corners for the projector. Harry Houdini sits at the left with a heavy book open on his knees. At the right, in a carved armchair, sits Abraham Lincoln, dead by then for more than half a century. Look at the curtain behind Lincoln: its folds run through his coat. Houdini is lit and solid. Lincoln is grey and thin, printed in from a second exposure.

The Library of Congress catalog says Houdini had himself photographed with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln to show the company he could keep with the right technique, and dates the slide between 1920 and 1930. Who pressed the shutter, the catalog does not say.

Clearwell Caves, in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, April 5, 2010. Andy Dingley photographed this pool with a Fujifilm FinePix J10, a compact camera whose flash sits close to its lens. The flash lit the water nearest the camera almost white, and it lit something else: specks hanging in the air just in front of the lens, far too close to be in focus. Each one comes out as a flat grey disc you can see the rock through.

Dingley’s own caption puts the discs down to particles of water or dust. Which of the two it was, in a wet cave, the frame cannot settle.

A hotel corridor at night, sconces on both walls, and a woman in a long white nightgown at the far end. Look away from her. The brass plaque beside the door says PLLASE KNOCK, and the line above it is letter-shaped marks that read as nothing. The gilt mirror on the left shows a dim room of its own, a doorway and a picture frame, and none of the lit sconces across from it. The woman is lit evenly, head to hem, in a stretch of corridor no lamp reaches.

We generated this frame ourselves for the game, to show the tells. They say no camera took it. They cannot say which model did.

Viking 1 Orbiter, frame 035A72, taken on July 25, 1976 over Cydonia, Mars, while NASA searched for a landing site for Viking 2. Near the center, one hill has two eyes, a nose and a mouth. NASA’s caption for the frame explains them: shadows in the rock give the illusion of a nose and mouth, the sun stands about 20 degrees above the horizon, and bit errors from transmission make up part of one eye and a nostril.

The hill is about 1.5 kilometers across. Later orbiters photographed it again at higher resolution and found an eroded mesa. NASA now calls it a natural hill whose face depends on the viewing angle and the angle of the light.

The Sainte Claire Hotel, San Jose, California, February 10, 2012. Ed Schipul photographed this corner during a wedding. The lamp, the plant and the frames are sharp, so the camera did not move. The figure in the left armchair did. Someone sat or leaned there for part of a long exposure and then left. The chair was there for all of it, the person for only some, so the chair shows through them.

Schipul’s caption plays along: “Only a long exposure can even capture her.” It is a joke, and it is also the answer. Who sat in the chair, the file does not say.

A carte-de-visite from the Boston studio of William H. Mumler, dated c. 1872. The sitter is Mary Todd Lincoln. Behind her stands a tall pale man with his hands on her shoulders, and the story that travels with the print says it is her husband. Look at his chest: the backdrop shows through it, while her black cloak stops the eye completely. Two images, made at different times, share one print.

Mumler had been tried for fraud in 1869 and acquitted. In a letter to the Boston Record he dated this sitting to late February 1872. Accounts still disagree on whether Mrs. Lincoln came to the studio under an assumed name.

Cam 2 looks down into a nursery through a fisheye lens: a crib, a rocking chair, a shelf of stuffed toys, a bear on the floor. A small child stands at the crib, holding the rail. Everything in the room carries the grey grain of infrared except the child, who is a flat white shape with no folds, no face and no shading. Read the overlay. CAM 2 NURSERY is clean, but around it sit HERDERD, TEP and 1:6.4k, where a monitor prints a date, a time and a temperature.

We generated this frame ourselves for the game, to show the tells. They rule out a camera. They cannot name the model.

The bishops’ burial vault of Paderborn Cathedral, Germany, July 30, 2011. R. Engelhardt photographed the tomb of Archbishop Caspar Klein with an iPhone 4, and a pale haze came out over the left half of the frame. It dulls everything it covers, stone, lettering and flowers alike, and lights none of it.

The photographer filed the picture under lens flares: light from the candle bouncing inside the lens. A smudged lens would lay down the same veil, and from one frame we cannot tell the two apart. Either way the haze formed in the camera, not in the crypt. Which of the two it was stays open.

The gallery of the Church of St Leonard, Old Warden, Bedfordshire, January 21, 2017. The photographer, Jack1956, described what came out as orbs. There is one, small, hanging against the graffiti on the dark panel at left. It is flat and evenly filled, with a soft rim and no shadow. That is how a speck of dust close to the lens looks when the flash lights it far out of focus.

Against the pale floor it would vanish. Against the dark wood it shows. Whether other specks hung in front of the floor, unseen, the frame cannot say.

A tree limb photographed by Peter Trimming on October 22, 2012, and filed under Muncaster, Cumbria. He titled it “The Scream.” The mouth is a hollow where a branch broke away and the wood rotted out; dead leaves lie in the bottom. The eye above it is a knot, the bark rolled round its rim where the tree grew over the wound. A smaller hollow at the left edge can pass for a second eye.

Two dark shapes above a larger one are all a face needs, and the brain supplies the rest. Where on the estate the tree stands, the record does not say.

A sepia studio portrait on a card mount. A mother and father sit in front, three children stand and sit around them, and an elderly bearded man stands behind the mother. He is the one people point at. He is paler and softer than the family, but solid: the painted backdrop never shows through his dark suit, as it would through a figure printed over a second exposure. The tell is on the card. The studio name reads Photogr:aphr Studio, and the date line starts at 196, runs into a malformed glyph and ends at 1996.

We generated this portrait ourselves for the game. The card says no studio made it. It does not say which model did.

A glass plate by Robert French, from the Lawrence Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland, dated between about 1865 and 1914. The caption scratched into the emulsion ends in “Co. Cork”; the town’s name before it can no longer be read. The shops, the kerb and the mud are sharp. The people on the left pavement are legs and bodies you can see the paving through.

The shutter stayed open long enough for anyone who walked past to be recorded only for the part of it they were there. The horse and cart stood still and came out solid. Which street this is, the library has not identified.

An albumen print on a card mount, made in Boston by William H. Mumler between 1869 and 1878 and now at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The back is printed JOHN J. GLOVER, with Mumler’s address on West Springfield Street. Glover sits looking off to the left. Above him floats an old woman in a white cap, her robe thin enough to show the backdrop, her body ending where his head begins.

Two exposures, lit two ways, on one print. The Getty catalog calls her only a faint image of an old woman. Who she was meant to be, the record does not say.

Munich, April 9, 2022, going by the file’s location data. The Commons user XoMEoX pointed a phone up at a ring of cross-shaped lamps, and a second, fainter set came out on the dark panels below, green-white, around a pale bulb of light. Draw a line from any green shape through the middle of the frame and it lands on a lamp.

Bright light bouncing between the lens elements and off the sensor makes these mirrored copies, and the lens coatings tint them. The photographer made the picture on purpose, describing its lens flare, reflections and ghosting as a photographic style. Nothing hangs in front of those panels.

The door stands open on a neglected nave: stained glass on the left, shafts of light, rows of dark pews, and a hooded figure sitting with its hands folded. Start with the notice pinned to the door. It reads SERVICES SUSPENDED UNTIL FU FURTHER NOTICE, the word begun twice and never crossed out. The same light that picks out the figure’s hands shows nothing inside the hood, only flat black. Toward the altar the pews lose their ends and run into one another.

We generated this frame ourselves for the game, to show the tells. The notice says a camera did not take it. Nothing in the frame says which model did.

A small window at night, January 14, 2013. The Commons user Earth100 photographed it and was plain about what happened: the file is described as house dust orbs, caused by the photographer. Dust hung in the air between the camera and the window, the flash lit it, and every speck too close to focus became a translucent disc.

That is why the circles cover the painted frame as easily as the glass, and why none of them is behind anything. The purple and green rims come from the lens, not from the dust. This one was a demonstration. Most photographs like it are not labeled.

Found in the Jewellery Quarter cemeteries in Birmingham, England, and photographed by Lukas Large on October 26, 2024. It is a puffball fungus. The surface is covered in fine granular warts, nothing like bone, and the two sockets are shallow and pale inside, with crumbled edges. Roots and soil hang where a jaw would be.

Two hollows side by side above a narrower base are enough for the eye to build a skull, and a cemetery does the rest of the work. The species has not been identified, and what opened the two hollows, the record does not say.

A carte-de-visite from the Paris studio of Édouard Buguet, undated, 1870s or 1880s. A white-haired woman sits at a carved table. Behind her rises a draped figure, and the ink below names him Napoléon III. His head is a sharp portrait; his body is gauze, and the table’s twisted leg shows through it.

In June 1875 a police sting found pre-exposed plates in Buguet’s studio, and he admitted in court that his photographs were fraudulent. The Missouri History Museum dates this print to around the 1880s, so it may be an older plate printed later. Who the woman was, the card does not say.

A trail camera in a pine wood at night, the infrared flash turning the nearest trunks white. A stag stands on the right. On the left stands a tall pale figure with long arms and no face. Read the info bar before the figure. It carries two different clock times, 10:14 and 03:12:47, a °C sign stuck to the first of them, and a brand name, Nigmano. Then look at the figure: smooth grey shading from head to heel, no hair, no skin texture, the finish of a 3D mannequin.

We generated this frame ourselves for the game, to show the tells. They rule out a camera, not a particular model.

Liverpool Lime Street station, dated January 11, 2006 on Commons. The photographer, SPDP on Flickr, chose the busiest set of steps they could photograph and fitted a new ND64 filter, dark enough to keep the shutter open in daylight. Commons lists the exposure at one second.

In that second the lamp posts, the signs and the grit bin stayed put and came out sharp. The people did not. They crossed the steps as grey smoke, the stone showing through them. The photographer named the work of Alexey Titarenko as the inspiration. Not one of the people on those steps can be recognized.

An albumen card photograph by William H. Mumler, Boston, 1869 to 1878, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum. A young woman sits with her arms crossed. Above her head three pale arms reach down out of nowhere, with faint sprays of flowers around them. None of them joins a body. They are as flat and thin as a second, weaker exposure, and the backdrop shows through them while the sitter stays solid.

The Getty’s current title names her as Fanny Conant; an older catalog title calls her unidentified. Whose arms were photographed for the spirit, no record says.