Lens-Artists,  Photographic techniques,  Themed galleries

Gallery: puzzle time

August 30, 2026 / 63 Comments

If you are curious, you’ll find the puzzles around you. If you are determined, you will solve them.

Erno Rubik

Most of the time when we take a photo it’s our intention that the viewer understands what they are looking at. Some might even say that the whole point of photography to present a clear image of the world. And much of the time that is what I am doing with my own photography. But sometimes it can be fun to distort or manipulate that image in order to create a different vision.

For this week’s Lens Artists challenge Sofia is asking that we set our viewers a quiz by sharing photos in which the subject isn’t clear. She suggests that we

find photos that will leave us puzzled, baffled, curious and asking out loud “What is it”? We’ll need to look again, maybe use our imagination… possibly even give up and just enjoy the image we have in front of us.

Such images can be macros taken so close that the main subject isn’t obvious, or crops that achieve a similar effect. We might take a photo from a strange angle. Or we can use editing techniques to disguise whatever was in our original shot.

Many of the shots below were taken some time ago but edited specifically for this post. Most are simple crops, but my feature photo, which is a rather easy guess, was taken as a macro on our recent weekend away in Yorkshire. The really tight crops were upscaled, and in some cases sharpened using Topaz AI. I’ve also included a couple of edits using the twirl technique which I first shared in a post back in 2021. And I also took a few close-ups specifically for this challenge. When you’ve had a go at guessing you can check out the gallery at the foot of the page to see if you were right.

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The answers

Here is the promised gallery of the original images. You can click on any one of them to see its caption and scroll through them all as a slideshow. If viewing on a phone you may need to click on the speech bubble bottom right to read the caption.

63 Comments

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