Amityville Horror Pic, page 14

If the picture is real or not, it is almost impossible to decide since we only have small low res pic to work with.
But, in response to all people who years ago said the pictures wasn’t taken in the house, for granted, looking at the blueprints we can see perfectly it is the house in question.
I will not state anything regarding a photoshop analysis since for the reasons stated above, BUT, just looking at the picture as “technically correct/incorrect”, you have to note the shadows! Among the most important aspects in photography are the shadows to give the feeling of dimension. Note that there is a source of light since the railing cast a shadow below the lion painting, meaning the light source is above and aligned to the handrail top-left of the camera yet the head is not casting any shadow in the door frame.
Second, an infrared capture would turn the color different than what we could see in real life. So, perhaps a filter was used. Depending on the filter used, the capture would tell the story. So thinking that it was close to pitch black, with some kind of minor lighting from the third floor (as the shadows reveal); the eyes of the kid would be in total darkness, the proper rendering would be white which is consistent to the picture; BUT, the mistake there would be the handrail, being dark wood, it would be really dark and it should appear white too! Same would happen with the background on the two open doors.
Now, let’s think there is no infrared capture but a conventional high ISO black and white picture. In this case and with the technology in that time, even an expert would get a film about ISO 800. In this case, the picture would require a long shutter speed, depending of how dark it is, it could go from a couple of seconds up to minutes, meaning, the kid should have been static for all that time… but it looks too sharp in the picture to be a long exposure.

Photographers should know that recreating this is very easy. Looking at the un-cropped picture, the entire image appears to be in focus, telling us it was taken with a small aperture (say between f5.6 to f16) yielding that more light was required (hence the shadow) so a flash carefully located to conceal as much as possible the shadows is places along the railing… but then again, where’s the shadow of the figure?
Double exposure could be my answer.
The eyes? Easily done in post processing in darkroom work burning the area.
Possible? For the right amount of money, yes.

Is it real? I don’t know, but I’m inclined to say no.
After all this years, why the photographer or the owners of the picture haven’t made it public in high resolution for scrutiny? Perhaps because it is better to sell millions of small ones that can’t be analyzed instead of a real one which could be proven fake and therefore stop the profit.

What do you think?