What's in the Chimney?

Pre Widwed: Forced Perspective Optical Illusion

This was harder than I thought. I'd never tried it before. The technical side of the problem was straight forward enough but after bagging a range of different images across the day, many of the best ones ultimately seemed unusable for a variety of content reasons which I won't go into now. Let's just say lessons have been learned and I plan to do better tomorrow. :o))

Wideangle lenses are suited to this job because of their inherently  longer depth of field characteristics but for this purpose I often found that the best compromise between good dof and optimum composition was not necessarily the shortest focal length. In any event narrower apertures (f16 - f22) will generally work best. Each situation will be different of course.

Remember ... we are trying to suggest that the chief elements in any composition are in the same focus zone and that consequenty an observer's brain will assume that they are close together - even if they are actually far apart and incompatibly sized. The idea is to fool an observer into seeing things that aren't really true - an illusion.

All this is about tomorrow's Wideangle Wednesday Challenge: Forced Perspective Optical Illusion (widwed65), which I'd love you all to have a go at. Here are several tips which might help.

Tip 1
Tip 2
Tip 3
Tip 4

In the final analysis, this is supposed to be a fun challenge. If (for example) you have to use a non wideangle lens to get the result you want, don't worry. If you have an idea which takes you outside the scope of the offered links I (for one) really don't care. The final result and the fun you have in achieving it are the primary considerations. Here's one that greg_lovett did a couple of weeks ago.

Incidentally this is my patient wife Norma ,appearing to peek into a brick chimney - which in reality is well over 100 feet tall. It has an interesting history of its own.