Here’s something that’ll blow your mind (sorry that it’s an ad): stare at the colored dots on this girl’s nose for 30 seconds, then quickly look at a white wall or ceiling (or anything pure white) and start blinking rapidly. Congratulations, you just processed a negative with your brain!

(via eject via Rob Sheridan)

P.S. Next time you’re in the photo lab, try doing this trick with your loupe and lightbox to save yourself some test prints.

Photographer Zander Olsen creates amazing optical illusions by wrapping trees with white linen, lining up the ends of the material with the horizon line in the background.
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‘Moneyface’ is a photo fad involving folded money and hybrid faces. Simply fold a banknote containing a portrait in half and combine it with a human subject.
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Cell phone cameras have pretty poor image quality when compared with point-and-shoot cameras due to their small sensors, but one advantage they have over compact cameras is a naturally deep depth of field. That was particularly useful for this YouTube user in capturing some sharp video of his new motorcycle — something that would have been much more difficult using a standard point-and-shoot.

(via Fstoppers)

We’ve shared a couple stories in the past month on how human eyes are very subjective and horrible as light meters, and here’s yet another mind-boggling example of how easily our eyes can be fooled by context. In the image above, the “blue” and the “green” stripes are exactly the same color.

(via Top Cultured)

Here’s a mind-bending video in which someone created the famous checker shadow illusion in real life. The optical illusion takes advantage of the way our brains process lighting and shadows.

As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view. [#]

Interesting huh? Our eyes aren’t very good as a light meters, since they’re easily deceived by context.
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