Alice followed the White Rabbit down a rabbit hole and found a weird world of inexplicable twists and turns. Besides Alice and Lewis Carroll, this twisting photocomposition is in part homage to the work of M.C. Escher, whom I’ve been studying lately.

Getting the size right wasn’t so hard for Alice; as Jefferson Airplane put it, she had one pill to make her small, and another to make her large again. But getting the geometry of curvature right as Escher did is no trivial feat. This stuff takes visual and mental gymnastics.

View this image larger.

You have to start someplace, and I started with this shot of stairs in San Francisco’s Embarcadero complex. The Photoshop gyrations are a bit too complex to explain in gory detail, but mostly it’s an issue of blending the original image with portions of rotated and resized versions of itself. Finally, to give an added splash of vertigo, I turned the whole composition upside down.

The image is best viewed larger. Enjoy!

Related images: Spirals (this photocomposition has been selected for exhibit at MacWorld 2009); Resistance to Spirals Is Futile, made from the same base photo as this one.