How two photographers accidentally captured the same millisecond

On March 3, during a strong winter storm on the east coast [of the USA], I headed towards the ocean to shoot waves in motion. My path led me to the Great Island Common in New Castle, the main attraction of which is the lighthouse Whalebeck, located a kilometer from the coast. I was hoping to make a photo of the waves breaking on him, and mother nature did not let me down.

Great Island Common is a large park where people come for picnics in the summer and watch the ocean in the winter.
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Upon arrival, I positioned my tripod and a Canon 5D Mark IV with a Sigma 150-600mm lens to the right of the tree in order to isolate myself from the hard northern wind. As many of you know, it’s quite difficult to keep a 600 mm lens still, even on a tripod.

I set up the camera and waited until I saw a wave that began to hit the lighthouse. I continued to shoot until the surge ended, not knowing in advance how the wave would behave. Most of the pictures did not succeed, but about three of those that were taken in 45 minutes were quite good.

At home, I started screening images and selected one of them for editing and uploading to Instagram, replacing the photo I uploaded there in a hurry, from the parking lot. When local television, with my permission, shared this photo on my Facebook page, I began to receive a large number of comments and likes.

However, one comment claimed that I stole this photo from another New England photographer, Eric Hendon. After I informed the commentator that the image was mine and that I had the original RAW file, I went to the page of this photographer and was amazed. Our images looked exactly the same, they were made in the same millisecond, and seemed to be from the same place.


My photo, by Ron Risman


Photo by Eric Hendon

In addition to the settings in Lightroom, the photos at first glance seem almost identical, except for the water in the foreground and the slightly different position of the sheep. At the same time, the lambs were identical in size and shape - and I knew that these things were very easy to move in Photoshop, so I was worried about whether my image was stolen and then edited.

At first, I had access only to his low-resolution photo posted, so I could not make out the small details, which in the end allowed me to make sure that we both had originals. Having superimposed and aligned the images in Photoshop, I was surprised at how similar the lighthouse and the waves turned out to be - they had an almost pixel-by-pixel resemblance. As I already said, there were differences in the water in the foreground and in the lambs on the horizon, and it was these differences that kept me from reporting the theft.



It was only when another local photographer began comparing my photo with the high resolution version of Eric that he noticed the difference in the distance between the vertical rungs of the iron railing around the top of the lighthouse. This suggested that another photographer should have been a little to the left of the place where I was.



Since the 60D uses the APS-C sensor, it was most likely located a little farther from the beacon to compensate for the 1.6-fold increase or used a shorter focal length to compensate. This could at the same time explain another arrangement of the little sheep.

However, the fact that the lighthouse is not turned, and the crashing wave is absolutely identical, makes it surprising that these pictures were taken by chance by two different photographers.

Waking up the next morning, Erik collided with a stream of messages from me and other photographers, and immediately contacted me to share EXIF ​​data and to agree with the startling fact that at the same time, we took the same pictures of the movement of water to the nearest millisecond. What is even more surprising is the absence of any planning (as well as a significant event, such as a sporting event or a rocket launch).

In addition, I was not familiar with Eric, we chose the location of the shooting by chance, we were shooting from different cameras (60D and 5D Mark IV) with photo matrices of different sizes; the speed mode [burst mode] at 60D operates at a speed of 5.2 fps, and at 5DMKIV - 7 fps; we both used a focal length of 600 mm; our exposure and depth of field also almost matched (aperture f / 8, ISO 400, 1/1600 against f / 8, ISO 320, 1/1000); and in the end we chose the same photos for laying out. It turned out that we were only 28 meters apart. He hid behind a picnic fence to block a part of the wind, and for that I hid behind a tree.

I searched Google for similar cases to find out how often this happens, and I found only one article from 2011 describing how two photographers shot a surfing competition on Huntington Beach, and as a result got almost identical photos of the surfer on the wave.

If you were shooting water in high-speed mode, you know how great the neighboring frames can be, even if the difference between them is 1/7 second. And for five years I taught courses on shooting the night sky, and about 200 photographers passed through me, many of whom often aimed at the same object, filmed it with very similar cameras and lenses at the same time, and even carried out time-lapse filming. [time lapse] - and to this day I have not yet seen two photographs that would be so similar as to appear as copies.



And although this is a very rare case, I think that as the cameras grow faster and photographers prepare for pictures longer, such situations will have to arise more often. This can happen daily with fixed or slow moving objects (like buildings, sunrises and the moon), but almost never happens with moving water.