43 thoughts on “Invasion of the Giant Squirrel!”

  2. Interesting, it doesn’t seem giant to me, I don’t know what about the forced perspective I’m not seeing. To me it’s just a squirrel on a wall, not outsized at all.

    3. Ahhh… a LAWN!
      Yeah I just saw a wall and didn’t think the squirrel to be big at all.

      If I force myself to see it as a lawn, it kind of works.

      (Adding a touch of green in Photoshop would have been easy to do.)

  6. Easily. Car was in driveway to the left. Along the center is a raised wall separating the two driveways (left vs right). With no shadows (overcast?) you can’t tell that the wall is several feet above the driveways.

    House is in background, likely many meters beyond the car. Squirrel is on wall probably 1-2 m from the camera. And with pretzel reaching out, person snapping photo.

    So, forced perspective and using a small aperture puts everything in focus and lack of shadows so you have a much harder time with depth.

    2. It looks a bit like a still from a cell phone video, so the low quality of the image helps blur anything that would tip you off.

  7. As long as he doesn’t run into the rat I found in my garage yesterday, he’ll be fine. While the cat’s away, the rats grow huge.

  8. Forget the giant squirrel! Look at that giant human arm about to push over a perfectly good car!

    1. In fact the arm is crucial to the illusion, since it hides the edge of the wall. Without the arm, we’d clearly see that the wall is between us and the car, and not continuous with the pavement the car is resting on.

  9. I suspect it’s ‘shopped. Shadow from the house goes one way, shadow from the arm and squirrel go another.

    1. There’s no visible shadow in anything other than a very faint, very blended shadow from the arm onto the wall. I’m guessing this was a very overcast day with a thick cloud layer so you get a lightbox effect.

  10. What is also probably causing this confusion is that a telephoto lens is being used. The building that the squirrel seems to be near is much further back.

  12. The arm is the illusion, the squirrel has been shopped on.

    The squirrel has blends into the brick siding pretty well, so it’s hard to tell. But nature abhors a straight line, and I see evidence of shopping in the tail of the squirrel.

    Neat photo.

    I will not testify to this! LoL.

  13. At first glance, I thought that what turned out to be the top of the wall was actually the ground, covered with dead brown grass. I’m sheepish…

  14. I could swear I posted my commment already. Anyways, I think the dark blurry line under the squirrel is from a twig he’s holding on which it sits, and the rest is perspective. If not that, it’s Photoshop.

  15. I wonder if we also assume that the car is parked perfectly parallel to the wall, when it might not actually be. That might fool us as to where the vanishing point is, and how far away the car is.

  17. Weird effect. At first, I just chuckled and assumed it was edited in some way. Now, I can’t help but see the “correct” perspective, and it’s hard for me to see the illusory “giant” squirrel.

    The trick: the strip of “grass” that goes from the foreground to the house is actually the mossy top of a stone wall. I feel like I can see the wall continuing above the squirrel.

    1. I automatically recognised it is on a wall (perhaps because there’s obviously about 3 feet of car lower than the squirrel), but I still accept the photo as an ‘illusion’ because (to me, at least), the first impression is that the squirrel is at the same distance as the wing mirror, which would still make the squirrel far larger than reality.

      That might be because my mind ‘assumes’ that the squirrel is looking at the mirror – that it’s interested in the object apparently closest to its head. Or it may, as I said above, be something to do with the angles of the lines of perspective and whether the car is actually parallel to the wall or not.

  18. It’s clearly a wall. Once you get that in mind, the rest is easy. I will say it does not look telephoto to me. Looks like a cell phone pic.

  20. My best guess is that it was done with a camera, which took a photo of the giant squirrel.

  24. Amazing how one’s vision is seperable from cognition this way – I’ve read the lucid explanations and am *still* fooled by the illusion. Unlike, say, with the Muller-Lyer illusion where if I focus, I can (momentarily) see the lines the same length.

  25. I actually am the photographer of this picture. I took it on my iPhone 5 right after it rained. I saw a squirrel outside my apartment, so I rushed to get pretzels and peanut butter. The squirrel was hesitant to approach, but eventually took it out of my hand. I sent the picture to my friends, and they were confused saying the ledge looked like grass. As a side note however, my arms are really that big 😛

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