Photo or painting?

This is not a painting, it's a photograph. "Camel Thorn Trees, Namibia" by Frans Lanting/National Geographic. (via Juxtapoz)

• [ChicagoD]

  That’s awesome.

• [Ace M]

  That’s incredible.

• [seyo]

  beautiful.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Of course, even if it were a painting, it would still be a photograph as well.

  • [David Pescovitz]

    Smartass.

  • [Shinkuhadoken]

    Ceci n’est pas des arbres.

• [kP]

  Murdoch blocked

• [xzzy]

  It’s much easier to identify as a photo when you look at it full size.

  Scaled down, the detail of the white spots (which are actually rocks.. or maybe shrubs?) is lost. 

• [eldritch]

  Clever angle – placing a tall desert dune where one would expect the sky. Once you know what you’re looking at, it makes sense.

  It just plays on your expectations is all. Most photographs are on relatively level ground, with the camera itself relatively level. Most photographs display sky in the upper portion, not land. Most photographs with a dark foreground and a light background are night shots with dark land and illuminated sky, not day shots of dark land and illuminated other land.

  Just goes to show how much photography relies on pre-existing expectations of what the viewer is seeing.

  • [seyo]

    it’s also a play on what is in light and what is in shade. the foreground is still in shadows while the background is lit, which makes the scene as composed look abstracted. ten minutes later, when the sun was higher in the sky and was illuminating the trees, the same exact composition would have looked much more “normal.”

• [yri]

  I dunno, I bet the pixels are still wet.

• [dahlia]

  Wow, it’s like Magic Eye. Once you focus on the base of the trees and reset your mind to see its “realness,” then you can see the background as the dune it is.  Very, very cool.

• [RobDobbs]

  I took a photo with similar effects of an Alexander Calder in the MoMA from below:
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/creamaster/172503346

  Of course, it’s a photo of art so it lacks that same double punch.

  Here’s a photo that better represents the traditional way to view it:
  http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=81834

• [Geoffrey Schumann]

  if you’re an iPhone owner, there is a process that I was shown and have since made it my own.  It’s on a similar theme to what is shown here, you can check it out at http://ink361.com/#/tag/photoalchemy

• [Timothy Krause]

  Neither, it’s a screencap from Journey.

• [Philip Langley]

  My friends and I were there 2 weeks ago – it’s Deadvlei near Sossusvlei in Namibia. A vlei is a small lake, and in this case it has been dry for many hundred of years leaving a 1km piece of white dry mud in the middle of some of the world’s largest dunes. Although the trees are so dessicated, there is still insect life.

• [SamSam]

  Slightly off-topic, I’m interested in knowing why it is that the colors in this copy of the image are completely different from the colors in the copy on the National Geographic site.

  Did this go through some processing system on its way here? Or is it some artifact of compression?

  Photoshop tells me that your version has much more blue in it.

• [Leo Cooper]

  it is an impression, who really gives a rats at this time in digital graphic creativity, some people needing to be contentious about any little thing. If it be painting or it be photo what difference that make. Would some fool pay more one way or the other, pity that fool and stop his grizzling after he parts with his undeserved cash

  • [robdobbs]

    Yeah. What(ever) he said.