Thursday, August 26, 2010

Rolling shutter effect can make stunning iPhone photos



From tuaw, The image above was shot by Jason Mullins with his iPhone 4 on a flight from London to Guernsey. The weird black lines you can see are actually distorted, disconnected copies of the propeller blades, but this isn't a Photoshop hack; this was how the image came out of the phone.

Virtually all consumer grade digital cameras, including cell phones, do not take the picture instantly when you push the shutter button. Instead, they quickly scan over the CCD sensor from the top left to the bottom right, like the electron beam in an old CRT television. This is called rolling shutter capture. This scanning process is fast, but sometimes it's not fast enough. If you angle the device just right and take pictures of fast moving or rotating objects, you can create all sorts of weird and funky distortion effects. You can see more like this in the rolling shutter Flickr group.

2 comments:

Octopunk said...

That's a great pic! I've experienced this phenomenon while trying to photograph Zack bouncing in a bounce house. Mostly I've gotten weird Ring-like face distortions.

robin said...

Nice blog for Home Security information,here I have got home security gates,Shutters,windows and grilles with the help of Rolling Shutter
.

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