My boss forwarded me a slideshow of photographs (Video of slideshow) today.  While they are excellent, if not professional-looking photos, the clincher is that they were allegedly taken by an autistic photographer by the name of Patrick Notley.

A search on Patrick Notley brings up a lot of hits for claiming that this person doesn’t exist, along with websites/forums sharing the slideshow.

An image search shows that some of the images have apparently been around on the web for a few years more than any mention of them attached to Patrick Notley.

Anyone else come across this?  Or should I just be sitting back and looking at the pretty pictures, regardless as to where they came from?

Well, if you look closely you’ll see in some of the photographs the name of other photographers lurking in the corners.  The third photo, of the owl, is apparently by this guy.  The photo of the rocks in the water at 0:36 seems to be by Detlef Winkelewski.  The photo of the woman at about 2:30 is credited to Thomas Mörchen.  The road at 2:40 is credited to Thomas Agit.

I noticed that those photographers are all German, which helped me to identify the photographer of the image of the woman in the veil at 1:46.  That photo is actually one in a series taken by a woman named Gabi Dilly, who apparently specialises in glamour photos.

And that right there is something also; the photos in that slideshow are of all sorts of different types involving different techniques:  glamour photography, underwater photography, wildlife photography, landscape photography, carefully-staged stuff, off-the-cuff stuff, abstract stuff, the specialised camera work needed to get that photo of the burning match. . .photographers tends to specialise in one or a few areas, not all areas.  It’s certainly possible that a photographer would be skilled in all of those different types of photography, but it’s less likely.

The second photo, of the ship, is the S.S. American Star, which wrecked off of the Canary Islands.  I’m not sure who took that photo, though.  Probably a German, I’d assume.