This photo demonstrates the physics concept behind concave converging mirrors. To make this photo, I held a spoon up to a staircase in my house and photographically documented the ensuing event. The image of the staircase is obviously smaller than the actual staircase. The image of the staircase in the spoon is inverted because the staircase is far away from the spoon. If the staircase had been extremely close to the spoon, the image would have been upright and larger than the object instead of inverted and smaller than the object. Because the image is inverted, it is also real. This means that the spoon is a mirror and not a lens. The spoon reflects light rays inward, towards a focal point, which accounts for all of the image’s properties, including the distortion of the object. The edges of the spoon are where the distortion is most evident, because the edges of the spoon are the point on the mirror that are farthest from the focal point, which is what all of the light rays are bending toward.
