Nature's Largest Optical Illusion

I came across this image while checking out some posters and couldn't pass up including Nature's Illusion on this site.

According to 4th grade science an iceberg shows just 1/10th of itself above water. This means that the sailor of days gone yore never had any idea how large of a chunk of ice existed below the surface.

This particular image has a history to go with it. Since the image presented here was a little small I decided to search the net to see if I could get a larger image. One site said the following about this image.

"This photo came from a Rig Manager for Global Marine Drilling in St. Johns, Newfoundland. They actually have to divert the path of these things away from the rig by towing them with ships!

Anyway, in this particular case the water was calm & the sun was almost directly overhead so that the diver was able to get into the water and click this pic. They estimated the weight at 300,000,000 tons."

This story didn't ring true to me so I investigated further. Not surprisingly it turns out that this photograph is a composite created in 1999 by Ralph A. Clevenger a professional nature and underwater photographer who's had work published by the National Geographic, and is on the faculty of the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, CA. The artist says this about his creation.

"I created the image as a way of illustrating the concept of what you get is not necessarily what you see. As a professional photographer, I knew that I couldn't get an actual shot of an iceberg the way I envisioned it, so I created the final image by compositing several images I had taken. The two halves of the iceberg are 2 separate shots, one taken in Alaska and one taken in Antarctica (neither is underwater). The only underwater part is the background taken off the coast of California. The sky is the last component. It took a lot of research on lighting and scale to get the berg to look real."

The story of this image ended up being much more enjoyable then I would have anticipated. If you enjoy this image you can click on it to check out the poster.