Dead Zone Gallery

This site is by Tony Adams. It is a response to two articles by MediaTruth¹ claiming that Jonas’s 19 CR2 cloud images are forgeries. In “The Smoking Gun” (Medium) and “Forensic Analysis: Multiple Scientific Proofs of Insertion Fraud” (GitHub Pages), the author argues that the histograms of these files contain a “dead zone” — a gap between the sensor's black level and the start of the image signal — and that this gap proves the images were synthetically generated and inserted into empty CR2 containers, because real sensor data should fill this region with thermal and shot noise.

This claim is wrong. The dead zone is normal behavior in bright, low-contrast scenes photographed at low ISO. Sensor noise adds to the signal and widens the histogram peak at the signal level — it does not fill shadow regions hundreds of ADU below the signal. On the Canon 5D Mark II at ISO 200, read noise is approximately 6.9 ADU RMS, meaning the gap in Jonas's brightest images is roughly 58 standard deviations wide — far beyond what any sensor noise could bridge. A full technical breakdown is available in this Reddit post.

This gallery displays histograms from 362 CR2 files across three independent sources: Aerial Clouds Pack (315 images), Complete Clouds Pack (28 images), and Jonas (19 images). All of them show the same dead zone pattern, demonstrating that it is a normal characteristic of bright cloud photography — not a fingerprint of tampering. The gallery can be filtered by source and sorted by dead zone width.