Quote Originally Posted by David White
Does everyone shave their legs to wear a kilt???
Looking at the pictures it appears so.

dave
I don't think the men on this site or the men in those pics shave their legs. It's just a trick of the file compression technology that allows pictures to be transmitted across the web. In a picture the size that we post online a hair is much, much less than a pixel wide. So what we're seeing is the average of dark hair to light skin in any given pixel. That gets especially difficult to notice on people whose hair color is quite close to their skin color (like the white hairs of Ted Turner compared to his pasty white flesh). The average of the leg hair color to the much larger area of skin color is so close to the skin color it appears to us as if he has no hair in the photo. While the average of hair color on the top of his head and in his moustache with the underlying skin color skews to the hair color because of the large contribution to the color value average. But even in those areas that we easily see as hair covered, we don't see individual strands of hair but instead large groupings of hair. You can't see individual strands until you get really close and it becomes possible for the section of a single strand of hair passing through a pixel to take up more than one half of that pixel.

Most pictures formated for web usage are set for 72 pixels per inch. If one inch on that photo of Ted Turner equals over 1 foot, then that's 72 blocks of color making up that space. It's just not high enough resolution to really show much detail. A single hair width is vastly smaller than 1/72 of a foot.

So blame the appearance of hairlessness on web-optimization algorithms used for jpeg photographs. Higher resolution digital images intended for print will show more detail (such as hair or skin blemishes) and photographs with their much higher grain content will show even more detail.



To give you another example if you look at any of the photos of me