Riddle #2 - How to solve it

Once again, Riddle #2 is one of those that are actually aimed at people who have been to the location before and can recall it from memory. But assuming that you haven't been there, here is how you may approach the problem of solving the riddle anyway.

Recapping the riddle

+South Africa Travel Online asked 'Where am I' and the only clue provided is the image below:

What we have to start with

1. It's quite clear that it is a lighthouse
2. It also seems to be a lighthouse with unique architectural elements, see the 'turrets' to the left and right.
3. The main lighthouse tower is painted in red and white bands. That is of course very common for lighthouses, but all the same there are lighthouses that are all white for instance.
4. The lighthouse was photographed at sunset.
5. There's a ship on the horizon (not that I think that helps much, except to confirm that the lighthouse is next to a huge body of water - probably the ocean - judging by how tiny the ship is and considering that it has the shape of a bulk-carrier).

Any assumptions about the location?

1. With this one solving the mystery would become very difficult without making the following assumption: Based on the fact that the riddle was posted by _South Africa_ Travel Online, I am going to assume that the location is in South Africa. To be clear their last riddle was for an Australian location. But starting from this assumption and discarding it if it doesn't take you anywhere does make sense to me.

Will the above solve the riddle for me?

1. Copy the image of the lighthouse to your desktop or right-click on it, choose properties and copy the URL.
2. Go to www.google.com and click on 'Images' in the top of the screen to go to Google Image Search.
3. Drag your copy of the image into the search box or click on the camera image and past the URL into the appropriate box.
4. Click on search ...which will have you end up with a lot of sunset pictures in the 'visually similar' section.
5. Add "lighthouse" and "south Africa" to your search term (together with the attached image) and search again.

Now if you had a good look at the provided image and look carefully at the image results, nine rows down (at the time of posting this) you would have found the following image, which would have solved the mystery for you. That is by clicking on the image and following the link provided to the page from where Google got the image. You would have recognised the lighthouse primarily from the little 'turrets' on the side of the building connected to the lighthouse tower - even though the photograph was taken from the opposite side of the building to the one provided in the riddle.

Here's that image again:

Truth be told, I probably recognise it easier, because I've been there before. If not, I may have had difficulty to identify it. Futher down in the image results you'll find one or two more similar photographs.

But can we get a better match, more easily recognised?

Not with the image provided in the riddle, at least not as is. So we need to change it. Use an image manipulation programme available to you. I'm explaining what I did in Microsoft Picture Manager, a simple programme bundled with Microsoft Office - which I suspect most readers of this blog will have. But you may use Lightroom, Gimp or whatever you may have available. Here's what I did:

1. I copied the image from the riddle (right click > copy image - or similar).
2. I opened the image in MS Picture Manager.
3. I chose 'edit pictures' and then the "Brightness and contrast" section.
4. Play around with the three sliders until the photograph looks more like a daylight photograph. In my case it meant changing the values to the following approx. values: Brightness 43, Contrast 81 and Midtone 10.
5. The idea is not to make the image look pretty, it must look more like daylight with clearer lines for Google Image Search to recognise.

Here's what the image ended up looking for me (below). But if you spend time on it you can of course end up with a much better result.

If you repeat the Google Image Search route with the above altered image or similar your results should improve a lot. In my case, even before clicking through to 'visually similar images' the correct result shows up among the eight pre-selected by Google - though still an image from the opposite side.

On clicking through to 'visually similar images' the third result in the first row (at the time of posting this) is already clearly recognisable as the lighthouse in our riddle p showing the sloping roof of the building below and one of the 'mini-turrets'. In the third row (at the time of posting on my wide-screen monitor) is the image below:

.

...and by this time you should be pretty sure that the answer to the riddle is indeed...

...I am at the Cape Agulhas Lighthouse in Cape Agulhas near the southern-most point of the African continent. Well done.