Tilt-Shift Photography - Blows your mind...

[COGENT]

wow... thanks for this. I have been wondering how this is done for a while. I actually thought it was models when I first saw it last year.

[photon]

I emailed the guy with the cognitive blog, we'll see if he emails back.

[octothorp]

Tilt-shifted, time-lapsed video. really gorgeous stuff.

[onetwo_threefour]

I'm not a true expert, but my undergrad was psychology with emphasis on the more 'sciency' side like perception, neuropsych and experimental design and I think that photon's got it right. Our eyes constantly make saccadic movements to perceive the entire visual field, and large disparity in focus between the outer edges of the image and the central point can only mean two things. Either you're focussing on tiny objects fairly close to you at something close to your minimum focusing depth, or you're moving very quickly toward an object in the center of your visual field. Since the vestibular system is not sending any information that would lead you to believe you are moving the overall perception when you focus in on the areas of high focus is tiny objects close to you. You only notice the blurring when you look at the whole picture, and if you focus on the blurry part of the picture the effect is gone/diminished (to my eye at least).

I believe that is roughly the explanation from a neuropsychological perspective, but would defer to someone more expert than I. (Since I'm a lawyer now, it's been awhile) An interesting test would be to paralyze the eye muscles responsible for saccadic movements and then have the sujects view these pictures to see if the percepetion would change. This type of experimentation is fairly common in perceptual studies and may actually have been done somewhere. (But I couldn't find any mention)

[photon]

I believed you right until the part about the TTX! Just kidding thanks for the post very informative. Yeah I tried to find a study but my google-fu failed.

[prarieboy]

That is really cool. Thanks to all who posted images

[onetwo_threefour]

Originally Posted by photon

I believed you right until the part about the TTX! Just kidding thanks for the post very informative. Yeah I tried to find a study but my google-fu failed.

Actually I edited my post because I realized that I think I was confusing the agent used, and now I can't remember. I know there is an agent that can be used to temporarily block the action potentials that make the eye-muscles move but now I'm thinking it may not have been TTX. (Although TTX does definitely do exactly that, it is by no means specific to eye muscle tissue) Since I don't want anyone to inject themselves with something that can easily kill you I edited my post to leave it to the experts.

It was Boutulinum Toxin! Tetrodotoxin has never been used in human subjects as far as I know, but I believe it was used in some perceptual studies in animals...

[photon]

Lol cool. Coincidence that you mentioned TTX and I recognized it because I'm listening to an audio book and they talked about some moron who swallowed a newt. Only the newt had crazy amounts of TTX in its skin (the garter snake, a natural predator, being resistant to it).

EDIT: Oh, he died.

[The Fonz]

edit

[FurnaceFace]

I think we should use shift tilt as the photo theme soon. Give all the contributors the challenge of creating one over the next couple weeks?

[SebC]

Another cool effect to make things look small is large hyperstereoscopic 3D (two pics seperated by a large distance)... and of course, hypostereoscopic 3D (two pics seperated by a small distance) makes small things look big.

[Daradon]

Originally Posted by photon

What gets me is how you can't not see the illusion. How some illusions pop back and forth between seeing it one way or the other (you see the dolphins or you don't, the girl spins clockwise or counterclockwise), but this one you can't not see everything as tiny.

I guess it just fascinates me how the brain works and how easy it is too fool the brain with just a few subtle changes to an image.

The picture that you put above doesn't seem to fool my mind as much as some of the other examples. (That airplane one is pretty neat)

Do you know why the mind is fooled in this manner?

NM, Bobble seems to have a grasp on it. What he said makes sense.