What's Wrong With This Picture...?

by Ben Small

Images, the ones in our eyes, what we see. How much can we rely on them? Sometimes, images are influenced by expectations, maybe by prejudices, habit, cultural traditions, whatever... Compare witness statements about what was seen at a crime or event. They will vary.

Sometimes, these variances may be explained by physics, anatomy, the ravages of disease.

The point is... we can't always believe our eyes. We form judgments based upon conclusions formed from images before our eyes. But sometimes these conclusions are wrong; sometimes because we assumed what was not.

Take these two images. What do you see?

 

I know, a babe and brutes. Look further. A lot of money spent on these shots.

Do you see the errors? Most people won't.

In both of these pictures, the scopes are on backwards. Some prop guy knew nothing about weaponry, and he installed the scopes backwards.

Go for that zero.

And nobody caught it. Not producer, photographer, production department, editors or any other quality control mechanism. Everything broke down because of an incorrect assumption at the beginning.

You'd be surprised how often this sort of thing happens.

Here's another example, another instance where a mistake at the beginning led to disaster.

I believe this is an advertisement for Heckler & Koch, a renowned manufacturer of handguns and battle rifles.

There's only one problem: There's no H&K product in the picture. What you see is a Sig Sauer P-210, perhaps the most accurate production pistol ever produced.

Somebody got the wrong gun. And nobody at H&K or their advertising firm caught the error.

Even experts make mistakes.

But isn't this dynamic -- the incorrect early assumption -- often at the core of a mystery novel?

Of course it is.

Which is why I mention it.