The difficulties of photographing bigfoot

Subject is approx. 80 ft. from photographer

    **This is part one of a multiple post project explaining the difficulties of photographing bigfoot. Part 2 can be found here.**  

    More often than not, alleged photos of sasquatches show nothing more than blurry, shadowy groupings of pixels that may, or may not, be an animal. Blobsquatches, they are called. The "Beast of Seven Chutes" is a good example. The picture, at first, appears to show an animal. However, the longer one looks, the more one begins to question if it isn't some trick of the light or a misidentified natural object. Many skeptics cite the multitudes of blobsquatch photos when arguing the case against the existence of a North American great ape. So why do most "bigfoot" photos show blurry, out-of-focus shapes and not clear, concise images?

    Top of the line SLR cameras are widely accessible and now come with up to 21.2 megapixels to ensure professional quality in every photo. Point-and-shoot cameras are boasting upwards of 10mp now-a-days. Even the iPhone 4s comes equipped with an 8 megapixel camera. In today's technology filled world, bigfoot believers should be capturing clear, definitive pictures of this alleged "bigfoot", right? Wrong. Photographing at your niece's Soccer game is one thing, taking your camera into the forest is entirely another.

    Take the picture above and to the right of this text for instance. There is a six foot tall person in a bright green shirt in the center of that photograph. Can you find him? The subject is standing approximately eighty feet from the photographer. The photograph was taken with a Sony Cybershot that has 10.1 megapixels. The conditions are clear, the terrain is flat, there is not a lot of ground cover, and even the leaves on the trees aren't blocking the subject much. Do you see him? The picture below and to the left of this text is a zoomed version of the above. Okay, so now we see the guy! But notice how blurry he is? This is the result of applying a zoom effect to the photograph. Almost looks a bit like a blobsquatch. Now imagine if the subject was not wearing a bright green shirt. Not standing straight up. Maybe even hiding from the photographer? It would be near impossible to see him.

Same photo as above, zoomed.

     The dense forests of North America, and particularly those of the Pacific Northwest, create a very unsuitable environment for photographing animals. Consequently, they make a very suitable environment for large animals to remain hidden. Assuming sasquatches are real and that they have no interest in approaching humans (who can blame them, we're not the nicest species to coexist with) I feel it would be very easy for them to remain hidden.

    I was the subject of the two photos seen here. From my position, approximately eighty feet from the photographer, I had an exceptional vantage point. Were I a large, intelligent animal that did not wish to be spotted, I would have had no trouble scoping out the photographer from further than eighty feet away and slipping off back into the forest.

Subject approx. 50 ft. from photographer

    The odds of getting a good photo of a sasquatch are stacked against researchers for a number of reasons: There are vast amounts of untamed wilderness in North America. If bigfoots do exist, they have a huge amount of land to occupy. In all of this wilderness finding one of these animals would be beyond difficult. If one was immensely lucky and did find a bigfoot they'd better hope they have a camera with them. They'd also have to have the camera at the ready, be able to focus it, and snap a photo of the animal. (When I say "focus it" I mean manually focus the camera. Auto-focusing is next to useless in dense foliage. I'll touch more on this in the next post.) Considering the difficulty of photographing in forests presented above, the odds of the photo being clear and concise are low. Very low. Also worth considering is the alleged nature of sasquatches. Researchers claim the cryptids tends to avoid humans. This would only further increase the difficulty of getting a good shot of the animal.
 
    Blobsquatches dominate the world of bigfoot pictures, and rightly so. The difficulty of photographing effectively in a forested environment is immense. Hopefully we can all keep this in mind as we move forward.

    Thanks for reading!

 - A.Z.