My Personal Duck-Rabbit

[akirlu]

I've been continuing to upload and edit photos from our October trip to flickr. I'm just finishing up the photos from Ravenna, and was pleased with how well the Aviary app was able to bring out the color and detail in the amazing Byzantine mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale, and the Mausoleo Galla Placida. The lush, complex, gradient greens and rich cobalt blues shine right out of the images with a bit of tweaking of the saturation and brightness filters. But most amazing is the degree to which the sharpness filter compensates for the fuzz of handheld photography in dim light. It's just magical watching the photo I wanted pop out of the one I took, especially the ones from the mausoleum whose banded alabaster windows are all quite small and not especially numerous.

Among the photos, this one keeps catching my eye, though, because there's something about the graphical, almost 3-dimensional, quality of the mosaics that make the picture visually ambiguous, or paradoxical. Like the famous visual paradoxes of Maurits Escher or the old woman/young miss, I often see the two different, mutually exclusive possibilities: here the sunburst seems at first as if it's projecting upward, and the undersides of the arches look domed towards the viewer momentarily before the image snaps into place and I can see that the sunburst is actually receding away, above the concave arches.

Weird. Does it have the same effect for you?



And if the image does doe that for you, you can see the section in its context in the image below, which may help clarify the actual orientation for you:

Comments

[maribou]

Beautiful! Thank you for sharing these here.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

WOW, just WOW

[coth.livejournal.com]

Very beautiful. And yes, the snapping is there for me.