Through a glass darkly

I have a “deceptive” glass in my small collection of interesting glasses.  A deceptive glass has very thick sidewalls, and thus holds much less liquid than it appears to when filled.

In Georgian times coaching inns had them.  A coach would stop, passengers would rush in for a quick drink and be given it in a deceptive glass.  They paid for a full normal glassful of course!  I looked at the glass with its thick walls and thought, “That might act as a lens”!

My camera was fitted with the Oly 60mm macro lens, so I just held the glass up against the UV filter on the front of that lens and pointed at our Christmas tree.  There were two ways round to hold it; wide end first or narrow end first.  Looking from the wide end towards the narrow end gave an inverted image of the tree in the centre and some nicely stretched lights on the sides.

Turning the glass round so the macro lens was looking through the narrow end gave a more abstract image with lots of “squiggly” highlights.  There’s also a fab spectrum in the foreground.

Distortion through refractive material is fun, so I’ll be trying some of my other glasses soon!