22 September 2014

Hidden Face in Renoir Painting?

I have an app on my tablet called Jigsaw Puzzles that lets you do a jigsaw puzzle from any photograph you supply, or one of the built-in samples that the app comes with. I was working on a puzzle of Renoir's painting Woman at the Piano, which I'd seen and photographed at the Art Institute of Chicago. As it is a portrait orientation painting, and the app runs in landscape mode by default, I had started working on it with the woman rotated sideways. Doesn't matter much when you're just working on the edges and gathering like colors together. But that perspective caused me to notice something that I wouldn't have noticed if I'd been working at it upright.

The stool she's sitting on, when rotated 90 degrees clockwise, appears to have a hidden picture of a bearded man's face in it. What do you think?

Here's the original painting:

Now here's the seat cushion from the stool, rotated sideways and skewed a little bit, and enlarged:

Do you see the bearded man or am I crazy (like people who see Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich)? Could it be a signature self-portrait of Renoir himself hidden in the painting? I'm sure someone would have found it and commented on this before if so, but I can't find any reference to it online.

Anyway, it's interesting what you can see if you look at something familiar from an unusual perspective, and close up.

08 September 2014

Harvest Supermoon

Or is it a Super Harvest Moon? I need a more stable tripod head for my heavy 500mm lens. I have a ball-and-socket head, and it creeps a bit even after I tightened it; plus it's hard to focus the 500mm lens, so I had a tough time getting the image as sharp as I wanted. I tried a number of different combinations of settings to eliminate camera shake, let in enough light, and get a depth of field that would give me a sharper image. I ended up settling on this one taken at f/10, 1/500 sec, and ISO 200. It's my best moonshot yet. Makes a big difference having a lens that really works with my camera! If you recall, the last moon photo that I posted had an interesting story with it, about a lens that didn't fit the camera.


 

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