The World's Most Inspirational Iceberg Is a Fake

The World's Most Inspirational Iceberg Is a Fake(nautil.us)

82 points by signaler 10 years ago | 26 comments

prewett 10 years ago |

I was curious if there were any real iceberg pictures. I think I found a few:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthpicturegalleries/...

http://www.divephotoguide.com/underwater-photography-special...

GBond 10 years ago |

> We’re still making sales. It’s approaching $1 million. I get about 40 percent of that. It put my kids through college.

Wow. Can a stock image still achieve that kind of earnings in today's commodified market?

AtlasLion 10 years ago | |

It started selling way before digital photography, that could explain a lot of it.

stevesearer 10 years ago | | |

Just found another article which describes other popular stock photos that continue to sell and most of them are older, pre-digital photos as well.

>The record for a single sale, he says, was about $35,000. “It still brings in some hefty money,” he says. [1]

[1] http://www.pdnonline.com/features/Stock-Photos-That-Ke-1294....

bcraven 10 years ago |

Here's a video with the photographer about the image:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NeyTEO_JP0

Animats 10 years ago |

I never saw that image before, and it's obviously fake. You just can't see through that much seawater.

thyrsus 10 years ago | |

I've seen the image several times, and I'd always assumed it was a painting, using photo-realist techniques.

protomyth 10 years ago | | |

Yeah, I thought it was someone that does the background painting for movies. The physics of taking that photograph just didn't seem possible.

jldugger 10 years ago | |

It's also lit from below, because you know, the ocean floor is bright and reflective.

afterburner 10 years ago | |

And the bottom of such a huge iceberg can't possible be as well lit as if the sun was hitting it from below. (And of course it looks like that because it's an above water shot, flipped.)

kaffeemitsahne 10 years ago | | |

(And of course it looks like that because it's an above water shot, flipped.)

Doh. I was imagining him actually flipping an iceberg upside-down for some reason.

gene-h 10 years ago |

Now the interesting thing to do would be to take one of these iceberg pictures for real. Since we can't see through this much see water the thing to do is make a huge grid of cameras and put it directly up against the iceberg.

Alternatively, once could lower a line of cameras to scan the iceberg.

elchief 10 years ago | |

"see water" heh

jberryman 10 years ago |

icebergs turn over quite often, as the seawater eats away at the bottom until they become top-heavy. When they do you get that really strange brilliant blue color which comes from dense glacial ice which has had all the air bubbles forced out.

theandrewbailey 10 years ago | |

That blue is unearthly.

like this: http://www.alexcornell.com/antarctica/ and this: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tonyt/Tonys_site/My_Albums/Pag...

stevesearer 10 years ago | |

Here was a funny recent story regarding different iceberg photos with that effect: http://petapixel.com/2015/02/03/contest-copyright-controvers...

jberryman 10 years ago | | |

Ha I love that story! Very postmodern

bmm6o 10 years ago |

"Fake" is a little strong. As he says at the end of the article, you couldn't capture an image like that with a single photograph. He strove for accuracy, but who knows how close he got - the article doesn't go into that. His clients thought it was realistic enough and evocative enough to give him $1m.

prewett 10 years ago | |

The image purports to show a mass of hidden iceberg underneath the water. What it show instead is two above-water icebergs, one of which was flipped upside-down. That is totally fake in my book. If it happens to be accurate (and like you say, we have no information about that), it might correctly illustrate the idea, but the photograph is still fake.

aaron695 10 years ago | |

Other than being fake in every photographic sense it's also scientifically fake.

Obviously icebergs don't have that much under the water and they look significantly different in the underwater section.

I couldn't see it getting much faker.

bmm6o 10 years ago | | |

> Obviously icebergs don't have that much under the water

The popular notion that 90% is underwater is approximately correct: http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?pageName=iipHowMuchOfAnIcebergIs.... Or are you claiming that the picture in question doesn't represent a 10/90 split?

nkurz 10 years ago | | |

Obviously icebergs don't have that much under the water

What do you mean, and in what sense is this obvious?

pcunite 10 years ago |

If it looks too good to be true ...