Sunset Optical Illusion

I was surfing the vast wasteland of blogs a couple of weeks back, looking for optical illusions when I came across this sunset. It was included in a post titled Standing 'O'. This was one of those days when those gathered to watch the sunset were rewarded with a beauty.

James writes:

"As the sun slipped below the horizon, something happened that I have yet to experience again. The spectators who had gathered broke into applause."

At this time I pondered what coast this was on? Where was this beautiful sunset experienced?

Standing 'O'
Copyright 2005 James Jordan
Used w/permission

I saw the tall masted ships and thought it might be a inlet on the United States west coast, maybe this was on Florida's west coast?

I have seen similar sunsets from Key west past the piers with the ships tied up. There were many days in Key west when those that gathered to witness the beauty of a sunset broke into applause.

It might not even be in the states... maybe Australia, wait a minute I remember earlier photos on this blog being taken in Bermuda.

At this point I hit the back key on my browser so I could read the post (you see I had enlarged the photo immediately upon coming across it).

I was very surprised when I found out where this was taken. This image presented to me the optical illusion of something that wasn't there, similar to Kanizsa's Triangle optical illusion only instead of seeing a triangle that wasn't there I was envisioning a place/land that was implied even though we don't see it. Reality was different then the wanderings of my mind, beautiful, but different.

The link to this specific post isn't working but go here and scroll down to Tuesday, June 14th for the answer.

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Kanizsa's Triangle and Marketing 101

This figure above was introduced by Gaetano Kanizsa, an Italian psychologist. Everyone sees a white triangle in front of the three black disks and inverted triangle. However, the white triangle actually does not exist. The contours of this triangle are illusory contours created by your brain. Note that the illusory triangle looks brighter than the background. This is a result of brightness contrast caused by the black disks being partially covered by the corners of the illusory triangle.

Remove the black circles and the white triangle vanishes.
We actually see the Kanizsa Triangle Optical Illusion often in everyday life. I was cruising the web months back and came across a blog that presented the below figured used by "The Limited" chain of stores in their windows. He correctly pointed out that below we see a "Kanizsa Girl", we all see a girl where no girl actually exists.


We have all seen this technique used in marketing from time to time. If anyone comes across the blog that made this observation please leave me a message so I can give him credit for noting this observation.

Update: Adam C. pointed out another example of this type of illusion used in advertising. In the below FedEx logo we see an arrow which isn't really there. You don't really think that the arrow is in their logo by accident do you? Thanks Adam.

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The Art of James Bond

The long running James Bond series of movies has always had very interesting ways of opening their movies. The use of shadows and light have been big. Jay on Dataste.com posted this pic and linked to a site specializing in The Art of James Bond.

Again optical illusions are found in everyday life and film art uses light and shadows to create illusion better than most.

READ MORE - The Art of James Bond