The World's Most Inspirational Iceberg Is a Fake | Hacker News Reader

The World's Most Inspirational Iceberg Is a Fake

nautil.us

82 pointssignaler26 comments

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...

> 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?

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

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....

As a supplement to that article, here is a blog post linking to it that contains those pictures:

http://bintphotobooks.blogspot.de/2010/12/shelf-life-for-sto...

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

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

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

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.)

(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.

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

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

It would be a real challenge to actually photograph the entire underwater part of an iceberg. It's probably never been done. If you could find one in clear water, and set off some enormous set of flashes underwater, it just might be possible. That would be a good project for National Geographic.

I'm not sure the local whale population would be too happy with setting off something underwater to generate that much light. Would be interesting, though.

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

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.

"see water" heh

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.

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

Ha I love that story! Very postmodern

That blue is unearthly.

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

"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.

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.

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.

Obviously icebergs don't have that much under the water

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

> 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?

If it looks too good to be true ...

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