OK, stupid title. Sue me.
So I’m reading The Superficial (yes, I read some snarky celebrity sites. Why, you ask? It’s a mystery of the Universe. But they make me laugh), and they post a picture of actor Eva Longoria standing next to fellow actor Marcia Cross, claiming that Ms. Longoria is a garden gnome:
She does look pretty dinky there, I’ll admit. But I knew right away what was going on. This is an illusion: see how the driveway slopes down to the right? She’s standing downhill from Ms. Cross. That completely throws off your perspective.
Don’t believe me? Well, I did a very simple Photoshopping, cutting Ms. Longoria out and moving her up so that the bottom of her feet match the height of Ms. Cross:
See? She’s still rather petite, but not in the paramecium category. I looked up their heights: Ms. Longoria is 5 feet 1 or maybe 2 inches (155 – 158 cm); Ms. Cross is 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm). So in fact, Ms. Longoria should come up to about Ms. Cross’s chin, which looks about right. You can see Ms. Cross is slouching a little in the picture, and my cut-and-paste wasn’t exact. We’re well within the errors here.
Why bring this up? For one thing, I love optical illusions, and that has done very well for me when arguing about why the Moon looks bigger on the horizon than overhead, and why shadows on the Moon do tricky things.
But also because it’s just cool. Perspective, light, and shadow can be tricky, especially when you are taking 3D objects and projecting them onto 2D in a picture. Hollywood may be all about illusions, but some are pretty easy to reveal. It always pays to look for the man behind the curtain.
Image courtesy FlyNetOnline.
March 16th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
If the BA hadn’t said it himself, I would never have believed it. He reads celeb gossip sites?
I’m proud to say I’m not entirely sure who Ms Longoria is. Sounds like one of L’housewive’s desperate.
Pretty good optical illusion though.
March 16th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Reminds me of a joke from “Back to School” with Rodney Dangerfield. “If you want to look skinny, hang out with fat people”
March 16th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
hey! I’m 5’1″ too and I’m certainly not a lawn gnome! …at least, not that I know of! Where’s my beard?
March 16th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Nice. I grew up going to the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, and was fascinated by the distorted-perspective rooms they had (hopefully still have) there. Those produced exactly that kind of effect.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Can we call this gnome-like appearance ‘the Randi effect’?
March 16th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
This is a real stretch, Phil. (get it?)
March 16th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Careful, Phil… cutting & pasting pics in Photoshop, complete with lines added in for effect, is going to give Jack White a sense of validation! (I’m kidding, but part of me is afraid that I might be right!)
March 16th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
More illusions here: http://www.moillusions.com/
March 16th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
In the original photo, if you take a line from the top of La Longoria’s head toward Ms Cross you come to her chin which is where you claim she should be when measured against a 5’10″ woman. (she also comes to the chin of the bloke on the left, making him about 5’10 as well) There is no optical illusion here. In addition, Eva is wearing flat sandals and Marcia is wearing thick soles.
There is however, clearly a face in the light cluster of that SUV. I think that is a clear sign of intelligent life. No, wait, this is Hollywood….scratch that.
March 17th, 2007 at 12:25 am
[...] Marcia Cross’ newborn twins, Eden and Savannah. Marcia and her husband Tom Mahoney …It?s Eva Longoria, not Shortgoria So I?m reading The Superficial (yes, I read some snarky celebrity sites. Why, you ask? It?sa [...]
March 17th, 2007 at 2:00 am
Rockingham: also in the original photo, if you take a line from the bottom of Cross’s feet toward Longoria’s feet, you’ll notice that it hits above her ankles. Still think it isn’t an optical illusion?
The reason the cut & paste job doesn’t show Longoria’s head at Cross’s chin is because Longoria is closer to the camera… this somewhat offsets the fact that they’re on a slope, so it adds a couple of inches to the several inches that have been taken away.
March 17th, 2007 at 2:18 am
I wouldn’t count on the truth of ‘official’ statements of actor’s heights. It’s standard practice to lie sometimes to insane degrees.
March 17th, 2007 at 2:32 am
Who cares how short or tall Shortgoria….oooops Longoria is, she is more than welcome in my humble abode for a night of partying ect,.
March 17th, 2007 at 3:19 am
This is one of my favorite illusions at the moment:
http://www.grand-illusions.com/opticalillusions/chateau/index.shtml
March 17th, 2007 at 3:32 am
I’m not saying that she isn’t standing closer to the camera thatn Cross, just that given the difference in actual heights between the two women, Longoria does not look surprisingly short. She looks as a 5’1″ woman would look.
It’s difficult to tell with what is probably a telephoto lens, but if you look at the crack on the left that runs under that chap’s feet and then follow it toward the camera, you see that it is some sort of paving slab. Eva is standing on the edge of the slab. If you compare the position of her feet with that of the man, she appears to be no more that a foot or so closer to the camera. I don’t think that’s enough for the optical illusion to be significant. I think she looks small because compared to 2 people who are pushing 6 feet, she is small.
March 17th, 2007 at 4:22 am
While the distance from the camera and the slope of the driveway may play some role, based on that picture I don’t think they would be significant. It looks to me like that is a fairly accurate representation of their respective heights.
March 17th, 2007 at 6:16 am
I’m sure some Mooninite conspiracy theorist is reading this and thinking to himself, “Why? Why can’t they just accept the shadows on the sound stage? Now they’re seeing optical illusions everywhere!”
March 17th, 2007 at 8:30 am
Why do people concentrate so on optical illusions? Is it because we’re basically visual critters?
Years ago I happened upon a recording from a psych. lab that produced auditory illusions. It was fascinating to listen to a musical scale that seemed to rise(or descend) forever, yet the scale never topped(or bottomed) out. Our brains are really remarkable devices. With knowledge of its tendency to misaprehend sensory stimulii, do we innoculate ourselves from misaprehension of reality? Would that put illusionists like Randi out of the entertainment business?
Probably not. I really like surprises, so anyone who could fool me, even for a moment, makes for an entertaining time. Just because I can figure out how a card trick is done does not prevent me from enjoying the expertise displayed by the trickster.
All that aside, I have to rant on about the tendency to differentiate between science and magic. If it works according to known rules, no matter how esoteric, it ain’t magic.
Science means knwoledge, whether it’s about how to make light appear by flipping a wall switch, engaging a distant hydroelectric generator and heating a tungsten filament, or merely waving hands in the air and causing it to glow( I can think of one or two ways to do that), it’s still knowledge, which is why Randi still has his million dollar prize unclaimed, because NO ONE has ever displayed an esoteric knowledge adequate to move objects by looking at them, or knowing the contents of an envelope in a locked safe. If anyone ever does succeed in doing either of those, it will be because they have KNOWLEDGE, which means SCIENCE(from the Latin, scientia,knowledge). I know most people think of magic as wish fulfilment, but as my old Da used to say, ” If wishes were fishes, we’d all be kings,,,” but that only applies if you KNOW how to catch fish,,,
OK, rant over,,,
Gary 7
March 17th, 2007 at 10:45 am
It seems to me that the most relevant point was made by Darius, but few have picked up on it. In order to be precise in such an attempt at height comparison, you really need to try to estimate the distance of the camera from the subjects. Then you can make a correction for the perspective effect which actually exaggerates Eva’s height relative to that of Marcia. If you made the appropriate scale correction to the size of Eva’s image when moving it, then she would appear relativity shorter than she does in the BA’s doctored image. (Rockingham speculates that the camera used a telephoto lens, in which case the perspective effect would be small. However, I am not convinced that the lens was not relatively wide angled.)
IMO, there is no particular illusion here, and the photo fairly conveys the relative heights after our brains make the appropriate corrections unconsciously. I don’t see any evidence that the driveway is sloped, nor do I understand why a slope would make a difference in interpreting the relative heights. I think the relevant issue is distance from the camera to the subjects and not the relative height of the base on which a given person stands. (In any case, the lengths of the human bodies are seen to fall along the same vertical direction independent of the distance of the camera from the bodies.)
March 17th, 2007 at 11:22 am
I have to admit, the Superficial has become one of my guilty pleasures too… and only now do I feel secure in it. We nerds can enjoy superficiality as well!
Keep up the great work, Phil. Love the Bad Astronomy!
March 17th, 2007 at 11:38 am
The distance to the camera is probably not important here. Paprazzi tend to take pictures from far away using a big telephoto. If that’s the case here, the relative distances of Longoria and Cross from the camera are the same; a difference of a meter would hardly matter if the camera is 20 meters away. Telephoto lenses tend to suppress depth-of-field.
March 17th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Here’s a demo of how the optical illusion works.
http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-07/071406vortex.html
It has a picture of James Randi shorter than himself. It shows the effect of distance from the camera, as well as the position of the feet.
To my mind, the optical illusion isn’t particularly important in this picture. If Eva is 5’1″ and the other two are about 5’10″, there simply isn’t much of a distortion. The “garden gnome” nonsense is more about hyperbole and trash talking than having any relevance to reality. That site is all about mean-spirited hateful remarks. It exists only to put down celebrities. Reading the comments makes me want to clean out the gene pool, starting with the misogynistic and vicious people commenting there.
Read the bitterness aimed at Carmen Elektra and Alison Sweeny for having the misfortune to fall at a charity fashion show. It’s reasonably clear that Carmen stepped in the edge of her dress as it flared around her feet, and it looks like the same thing happened to Alison. Yet all the commenters can talk about is how ugly Carmen is and how fat Alison is, and how stupid both are for forgetting how to walk. It’s bitter, malicious trash.
March 17th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
As far as Electra and Sweeny, it looks like they fell in the same place, so I suspect it’s something on the floor. That’s the problem with these snarky sites, of course. I do get some schadenfreude from reading about people I don’t like, abut feel bad about the ones I do. Human nature, I suppose. I usually skip over a lot of the posts. I’m honestly curious about some people, but I couldn’t care less about Britney Spears’ head.
Oh– I’m willing to admit that this image is possibly not an optical illusion, but it does seem to me that she apperars much shorter than she should, especially noting that Cross is slouching. So I think there’s some forced perspective going on at least. That link to Randi was something I had in mind when I posted this, in fact!
March 17th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
It is an optical illusion- to my eyes.
In the first photo- it looks like Eva is only shoulder-length to the woman on the left.
In the second photo it’s clear that she’s quite a bit taller than that.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
The “original” photo looks like a photshop job to me. If you look at the woman in the center, the glass of the SUV is a different color on either side of her. Also, there appears to be an abrupt change in the shadows underneather the vehicle. If you look at the top of the vehicle the thickness of the roof rack and the ceiling seem to change on either side of her head. There’s also discoloration on that thin strip of metal that passes behind her head.
My guess is that we are looking at two different pictures spliced together.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Nah that picture isn’t fake. the coloration of the glass could just be a reflection, I don’t see any shadow abnormalities, and the thickness and color disparities of the metal behind her head are supposed to be there… did ya look at the picture from the original site? That’s just how SUVs are made…. and you can see follow up pics. It is very hard to fake series of pictures.
Speaking of photography, astronomy, optical illusions, I came across this pic and figured I’d share- http://www.dpchallenge.com/image.php?IMAGE_ID=218082
March 17th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
BA: “Paparazzi tend to take pictures from far away using a big telephoto.”
What does that say about astronomers?
March 18th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Try googling more pictures of the two women together and you’ll find that the height difference isn’t really exaggerated.
http://static.flickr.com/39/93121264_f63dfdeeb8.jpg
http://www.azcentral.com/style/pics/020206starpic.jpg
It should also be noted that actors are not always entirely truthful on their official bios. A tall Cross may have underestimated her height, while a short Longoria may have exaggerated hers, in order to seem closer to the average height that casting directors are likely to be looking for.
March 18th, 2007 at 2:04 am
In both cases the subject of the photo could be dangerous if you got too close ;o)
March 18th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
You want an optical illusion, look at the second pic on the article page.
http://thesuperficial.com/2007/03/eva-longoria-is-a-midget-02.jpg
Suddenly the “Garden Gnome” looks to have grown 2 feet. The top of her head is just below the top of Marcia Cross’s, yet her feet are way below. Suddenly she looks like a giant.
I concede in the first there’s a slight illusion. I think the details about her feet being lower in the image contribute to that. Still, you can mentally correct for that by observing it. The other detail is realizing that they’re not both supposed to be 5’6″ or so (167 cm). Yes, if Marcia Cross is a short lady, then Eva is tiny, but Marcia is tall, so Eva is only somewhat short. 5’1″ (155 cm) is short but not uncommon for women.
As Christopher says, look at pics of them together, the height difference is real.
paul, I don’t see any signs of photo fakery. The glass color difference has to do with what is visible through the window in each location. On your left of her you can see through to the garage door. On the right of her, you see the interior of the SUV. The second image down shows a different perspective, Marcia has moved aside and you can see the seat back separating the two parts. The “abrupt change” in the shadow under the vehicle slopes up and to the left, following the contour of the side of the vehicle. It is consistent with a sun high in the sky, can crossed behind Marcia’s legs. Not easy to fake. And as TAW says, SUV roof racks are built like that, thick corners and thinner cross rails. Plus, the line behind Marcia’s head is different because the brake light is right next to her ear. There also appears to be an overhang from the roofline.
Here is a picture from the Lexus website, showing the rear of the RX400.
http://www.lexus.com/lexus-share/images/gallery/models/RX/photos/exterior/g_ext4.jpg
The website has a picture gallery, 360deg views, and a video review.
There isn’t anything wrong with that picture.
March 18th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
The real question: Why is she dressing in that refugee outfit? With her skinny arms and legs sticking out of that potato sack, she’d look right at home wandering the streets of Calcutta.
March 19th, 2007 at 7:15 am
BA: “The distance to the camera is probably not important here. Paprazzi (sic) tend to take pictures from far away using a big telephoto.” And yet a wide angled lens would explain the apparent slope of the driveway, in which case the distance is important. Is there evidence that a paparazzo was responsible for taking this photo?
March 19th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Well, she may not be short, but she still can’t act *ba-doomp-ssst!*
March 19th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
David, the pics are from TheFlyOnline.com, paparazzi filled site. From the candid appearance of the pics, these do not appear to be expected photos. Thus, I would argue they are. What that says about the camera, camera distance, and lens configuration, I do not guess.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:24 am
The Irishman: “David, the pics are from theFlyOnline.com, …” Well, that was confusing. I eventually figured out that the correct reference is to FlynetOnline.com. There, I found the following: “Flynet Pictures grants people the rights to use only watermarked images along with a link to FlynetOnline.com.” The Superficial does provide the required link, but the BA does not. I don’t think that linking the photo from The Superficial’s site (as opposed to having a copy on the BA site) is sufficient to avoid the copyright holder’s linking requirement. This should be easy for Phil to fix.
March 23rd, 2007 at 8:01 am
Wow, how’d I screw that up so bad? It’s written on the picture above.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:21 am
omg i love this but email me some time
loL
i love you shoes
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:35 am
She is way too short…i don’t know what you people like about her..:-?
BTW her head is kinda big compared to her body…can`t you see?