2017—Optical Illusions

While photographing birds in the garden Sunday morning, the mockingbird hopped over to the stone bench in the back of my garden and perched on the ears of a concrete rabbit setting in front of the bench.   I liked the composition with the squirrel garden ornament directly behind the mockingbird and with its head cocked and directed the same as the mockingbird’s head.  When I downloaded the images, I realized that the mockingbird looks as if I superimposed it on top of a photograph of the squirrel.  Furthermore, it almost looks like the bird is in 3-D, ready to leap out of the photograph.

My guess is that compression from using the 600mm telephoto lens somehow created the illusion that the mocker is superimposed.  If I didn’t know better, I’d have said this was a poorly done composite.

mockingbird and squirrel.jpg

3 thoughts on “2017—Optical Illusions

  1. It’s the depth of field separating them and the relative same size that makes it look like a composite, distant out of focus objects are perceived to be smaller in the brain. That’s y guess..

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