To achieve some IRL distortion, I looked around my room and neighborhood for just about anything reflective or refractive I could find (that wasn’t meant for this, like a mirror or camera lens). None of my images are works of art so much as casual experiments, but it was fun thinking about how to approach this!
I made sort-of-triptych of distorted pictures through a glass jar held at several different heights. I love my eye in the first one!
For some physical distortion, I smushed my face with some clear plastic.
My favorite distorted image I captured, though, is this one. It’s me reflected in an outdoor electrical box. The metal is only kind of reflective, and it blurs more horizontally than vertically, which gives it a feeling of movement, though you can tell from the raindrops that the camera was still.
It looks almost like it could just be a weird camera filter, but no–it’s a sheet of metal.