Can anyone explain this?

[2slo]

There's probably a straightforward explanation for this but so far it eludes me. Yesterday, I took this shot of a Blackbird in my garden. I took the shot through glass (a double glazed window) and the subject was about 15 feet away. Normally, if I have to take a shot through glass, I'll get a position where the front of the lens is as close and as flat agaist the glass as possible in order to minimise distortion. This time however I took the shot at approx 45 degrees relative to the window and then thought it won't be worth looking at due to distortion. I was then surprised to see that although I'd lost some clarity, which you'd expect, the subject was distortion free but the BG shows the distortion you can see below. Since the BG is distortd from shooting through two panes of glass at a harsh angle, how come the subject seems virtually unaffected?

[WhereamI]

The background isn't distorted, it's more that you have a shallow depth of field and its out of focus, not necessarily anything to do with the glass.

[2slo]

The vertical lines slanting from right to left isn't something I've seen before, I can only assume that's distortion caused by shooting through glass. I take similar shots outside quite often with the same settings and would expect the BG to be a normal blur (i.e. without the diagonal lines), such as:

[jimmy156]

2slo said:

The vertical lines slanting from right to left isn't something I've seen before, I can only assume that's distortion caused by shooting through glass. I take similar shots outside quite often with the same settings and would expect the BG to be a normal blur (i.e. without the diagonal lines), such as:

Was it raining, looks like OOF rain to me !

Nice shots btw!

[2slo]

jimmy156 said:

Was it raining, looks like OOF rain to me !

Nice shots btw!

Lol, it does look a bit like that. It had actually just started to rain when I took the Blackbird shot, if you look closely you can see raindrops falling in the opposte diagonal to the distortion lines.

When I get the chance I'll take a few more shots at the same angle through glass, at varying apertures, just out of curiosity to see what effect it gives. Perhaps I could call it the 2slo effect. Or then again, maybe not.

[flat-planedCrank]

Shooting through a window can give lots of weird effects, even more so if the glass is curved and non-parallel to the camera...


By motion-images, on Flickr

[2slo]

Thanks. Some similar (diagonal lines) type distortion there.