Song For The Sky #13925

The Story

This double piano keyboard floats like magic under a fair-weather sky on a sunny summer day. In this picture, you’re in Mother Nature’s parlor room and there’s a song she’d like to play and maybe she’ll even sing for you. It’s a perfect day she’s provided, so relax and enjoy both the musical scenery and her other summer decorations around you.

Why would Mother Nature play especially for you, or anyone? That’s easy. We belong to her. We are her children. We live in her house. And always remember, it’s best to be kind to your mother. It makes her naturally want to play piano for you, among other good things.

So how did Mother Nature end up with an abandoned piano keyboard in her parlor? Actually, someone delivered it. They dropped it here where I found it, in the back corner of the parking lot at a small rural truck stop. In this case, a couple of guys most likely did the midnight dump-and-run to finally get the piano out of the house and were glad to be rid of it at last.

Unwanted old upright pianos are a big problem for people to get rid of. Along with encyclopedias, they’re the original white elephant when they age out or no one plays them anymore. Being bulky and very heavy, old acoustic pianos are simply a dead end.

What the…?

That’s usually the first thought people have when seeing this visual brainteaser, nothing is as it should be! Why is there a double piano keyboard floating under a blue summer sky? How was this abandoned piano keyboard picture made? It’s piano levitation using trick photography with only two small tricks involved.

The corner of that truck stop had been used as an informal dump for years. Naturally, someone with no place to go with a very large broken plate glass mirror would end up here to dump it off in the little pile along with the piano, which had been pushed over onto its back. Trying for something out of the ordinary, I cleaned up two big pieces of the broken mirror and placed them on top of the piano, letting only the busted keyboard showing. It’s easy to see the long cracks in the mirror. Then it was photographed at a very low angle to include the summer sky.

I really wouldn’t be surprised if it were the same people who dumped both the plate glass mirror and the piano! This was such a remote place only a few would know of it.

The second and last trick was done on the computer, by simply turning the original picture upside down…and there you have it! One abandoned piano keyboard made into two floating under the blue sky. Piano levitation made easy. The entire arrangement was created in one shot with no Photoshop tricks, just a mirror and a flipped image to make a brainteaser. Essentially, this picture is simply a sky reversal and you could even do this simple trick photography with a film camera.

Location: Munster, Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Picture and story © Andrew Dierks