By TAKAYUKI KIHARA/ Staff Writer
August 26, 2023 at 07:00 JST
Is it real or a composite photo?
Though Kenichi Ohno, 79, a resident of Miyoshi, Saitama Prefecture, outside Tokyo, shot the surreal egret photo, even his wife didn't believe him.
“I just happened to capture the scene,” he said. “I was astonished, too, when I checked the image reproduced on the computer screen upon returning home.”
The work was so mysterious that his wife, Tamako, 78, said it “must have been made from multiple images” at first sight.
But it was not a composite photo. Instead, Ohno's work of an egret leaving for “another world” in the scene shot in Saitama Prefecture was created by the serendipity of nature.
The enigmatic photo went viral on social media, drawing considerable attention even outside Japan.
Ohno submitted the photo, titled “Hedatari” (Separation), to the 39th contest co-organized by The Asahi Shimbun, the All-Japan Association of Photographic Societies (AJAPS) and the Forest Culture Association for works showing nature in Japan.
Winning the acclamatory comment of a judge who described it as “interesting because how it was taken cannot be readily deduced,” Ohno’s piece was awarded a special prize in the competition held in the last fiscal year.
SURPRISE ON RETURNING HOME
Ohno said he picked up his photography hobby some 10 years ago following retirement from his workplace.
He recounted what scene is reproduced in “Separation” and how he shot it.
According to his account, Ohno was waiting for herons to fly to a floating islet in the Isanuma marsh in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, a 30-minute drive from his home.
He looked away on a whim and found an egret roaming the waterside in search of food. Ohno turned his lens toward the white heron and released the shutter 20 or so times.
One of the images snapped at the time portrays the scene.
The photo is apparently separated into right and left sections colored orange and blue, respectively. The right part seems to be further divided into upper and lower halves.
“It looked like the right side of the photo had depth when checked on my PC monitor,” recalled Ohno.
The fact is that the upper right area shows not natural scenery but an artificial object.
“Photographed was a concrete wall of the water channel linked to a floodgate that protrudes into the shallows,” Ohno explained. “The lower right portion represented the wall’s reflection on the water surface.”
The egret was walking from the concrete wall-reflected water toward the side featuring the sky’s color. A close examination reveals the border between the orange and blue sides on the right and left wavers in part due to ripples in the water at the heron’s feet.
The picture was reportedly captured at around 4 p.m. on a November evening under a windless environment with the sunlight coming from the west.
“I took a photo at the same location on another day only to find it impossible to create the same scene again,” said Ohno.
GOES VIRAL WORLDWIDE
After winning the special prize in the contest, “Separation” was posted on the AJAPS’s website. It quickly attracted attention on social media.
A man in Hyogo Prefecture wondered “how the image was created.” He shared it on Twitter, which is now called the X platform, this past spring, in the hope of his followers unlocking the magic behind the scene.
His post was reportedly viewed more than 4 million times in a single day, drawing a succession of comments from those who, for example, “cannot understand why the scene is possible no matter how many times I examine it.”
A Twitter user even suspected the photo “may be made from two different images.”
As soon as the secret of the picture was detailed by another’s post, many words of surprise came in.
One said the online user felt as if “lightning raced down my spine” after learning of the mechanism, while a tweet called it “unlikely for me to hit upon the idea of shooting a photo from this angle if I had been in the same place.”
The sensation spread outside Japan as well.
The operator of PetaPixel, one of the leading photography-themed online media in the United States, contacted the AJAPS’s secretariat for permission to present the work.
My Modern Met, which distributes articles on a range of artistic topics primarily in New York City to attract interest among creators, reported on the photograph, stating “this photo of a bird isn’t photoshopped or AI-generated” through image-editing software.
“Separation” has also made its appearance on the indy100 site run by the British newspaper Independent, the Upworthy video distribution service from the United States and the online edition of Britain’s Daily Mirror newspaper.
“I did not imagine the photo would draw such a huge response,” said Ohno.
Ohno still goes to Isanuma two to three times a month to take pictures.
“I try to shoot a similar one but I cannot,” he said. “I feel from my heart that photography is a form of art characterized by a chance encounter.”
Ohno said he will keep on pursuing unexpected, one-time encounters from here on out.
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