Eschewing color photography

St. Hedwig is a small town just east of San Antonio. (By "small" I mean population-wise; the land area is actually quite large.) It's pretty much a farming community, and not much goes on out there, but sometimes crime does happen.

Last night, a domestic squabble ended in the death of one man. Here's the KSAT-12 version of the story:

According to the Bexar County Sheriff's Department, deputies were dispatched to the home 32-year-old Cameron Wilburn and his girlfriend shared Monday evening for a disturbance. But when they got there, department spokesman Lt. Martin Molina said, Wilburn was already gone.

Molina said four hours later, they got another call from Wilburn's neighbor, who told dispatchers he had shot and killed his neighbor.

Molina said Wilburn's girlfriend went to the house of her neighbor, 43-year-old John Vollmer, shortly before 11 p.m., fearing Wilburn would return home. While she and Vollmer were talking, Molina said, Wilburn showed up at the house with a handgun. Wilburn's girlfriend went inside her neighbor's home with her two kids, while the two men struggled over the gun.

Wilburn ended up getting shot, and he died. So far, nothing really strange. Until you watch the video of the story. There, KSAT uses what looks like a booking photo of Wilburn. And the photo itself looks bizarre because it has the appearance of an antique, sepia-toned picture from the late 19th Century.



I don't know what police department took this picture, if it is indeed a booking photo, but it's weird that they didn't use full-color. Perhaps someone at the police station was playing around with photo-editing software and saved the wrong version, resulting in a sepia master instead of color. Or perhaps they were fiddling with the camera controls and couldn't figure out how to get back to color when the next booking came in. Or maybe KSAT made the mistake themselves when capturing the photo for use in the video.

I don't know. Do any of these seem plausible to you?