OSINT Writeup: Sofia Santos Challenge #010
Last updated
Last updated
Hello and welcome back to another writeup. This one's for Sofia Santos' OSINT Challenge #010. I was busy with studies so, this writeup comes after a long gap. Apologies for that and now, let's dive in!
The challenge contains a tweet with three images. We're supposed to find out:
a) Which event is being celebrated in the photos? b) Which two photos were taken by the same person? c) The two photos mentioned above were taken in the same city. The photographer was previously in a different city. Find out the name of that city.
Sources Used:
Google Search
Google Image Search
Google Maps
Dan Kitwood's Portfolio
Getty Images
Adventurous Gina's Blog Post
Twitter/X
Photos.com
To begin, I first ran a Google Lens Search on the images. And, I found something interesting in the first image itself. Running a "Find Image Source" search, I found a Pinterest page with the image and a link.
The link is not working anymore, but, the link contains a name "dan kitwood". So, I googled this name and turns out Dan Kitwood is a photographer for Getty Images. This could be a breakthrough! I looked through Dan Kitwood's portfolio and found an album called "Voodoo".
According to the description, the pictures are taken in Ouidah, Benin. Scrolling through the album, I found another picture from Sofia's challenge!
The first picture which led me to Dan Kitwood is not visible on the portfolio page but it's highly likely that both these pictures were clicked by Kitwood. So, to make sure I ran another search on the first picture and found a Getty Images link with copyright credits to Dan Kitwood.
The Getty Images website provides additional information. The picture depicts a "Zangbeto" performing at a Voodoo ceremony in Benin's Annual Festival. So, the answer to the first question is Benin's Annual Festival.
Let's also look at the second picture in Sofia's challenge and figure out where it's from. Google Lens Search only gives one fruitful result which is a blog post. The blog post too mentions the Zangbeto performer but no photographer is credited. It is possible the picture was taken by the blogger themselves. The EXIF data of this image also confirms that the picture was clicked at a different date.
We know the pictures by Dan Kitwood were clicked in Ouidah, Benin. So, I looked up both these information together to figure out the exact date when these pictures were clicked.
According to Dan Kitwood's portfolio page, the pictures were clicked between January 7, 2012 to January 10, 2012. As we got a tentative date, we can now look for where Dan was before arriving in Ouidah.
From Dan's portfolio, I found their Twitter (or should I say X) username. Now, Twitter has a special search filter where you can look for tweets by a certain user from a certain timeline. This filter is very versatile, we can also look for keywords, some other user they were replying to and so on. For this challenge, I looked up Dan's tweets from 1st January, 2012 to 15 January, 2012.
On 7 January, 2012 Dan has posted a tweet saying "Heading to #Benin's #Voodoo heartland, Ouidah. Will be glad to get away from this motorcycle madness in #Cotonou. Gotta Love #Africa." A quick Google search tells me that Cotonou is another city in Benin and it's not pretty far from Ouidah.
So, according to the tweet, Dan could have been in Cotonou on January 7, 2012 and then travelled to Ouidah. But, we need definite proof so I went back to Google and this time looked for anything linking Dan Kitwood to Cotonou.
In the website Photos.com, I found a picture accredited to Dan Kitwood. The picture was clicked in Cotonou and the date was 6 January, 2012. So there's our proof! The answers to Sofia Santos' Challenge #010 are:
a) Benin's Annual Festival b) Picture #1 and #3 are clicked by the same photographer, Dan Kitwood c) Cotonou
A big thanks again to Sofia for this fun challenge and I will see you all next time. Adios!
