This photo was taken on an iPhone. The propeller was spinning at somewhere around 2000 rpm. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a rather weird effect as the image is so seamless. Is this a natural phenomenon or a result of the camera hardware or software.
I’m sure there’s some dashingly clever individual out there that is going to comment and tell us exactly why this occurs – so we’ll let them.
Update: for those of you that think this is a photoshop we’re stating to see more examples like this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rdub/3732616314/
Mmmmmm fascinating!!
See similar happen will a mates iphone, we could never figure it out, someone tell us!!!!!
i reckon its because the camera was scanning from side to side in this image.
and in the fraction of a second it took to complete each “slice” of the photo, the propeller moved through it creating these vertical bars.
That’s amazing!
I hope I can take a picture like that on my iPhone some day…
I dunno, cool effect. Time to call Scully and Mulder from the X files – oOo
that’s really bazaar looks like its not attached.
Yes, cheaper digital cameras scan the CCD serially from top to bottom, so that the scene they are capturing at the bottom of the frame is a fraction of a second after what they captured at the top.
It looks like the photo work of Hipgnosis who used to design Pink Floyd (and other) album covers. Very cool effect. Must try it myself.
its the iphone trying to capture the moving propellers which is making the propellers look like that.
all it is the hardware is it a 2 mega pixel or 3 mega pixel camera?
I think this is due to the way the iphone avoids (loosely avoids…) camera blur without a decent camera or proper zoom. It takes a burst of pictures in some conditions so what you are seeing is effectively a few pictures stitched together.
Correct me (anyone?) if im wrong.
Tom (Jest)
It’s basically because the iPhone camera, or rather the software that controls it, isn’t very good. The software takes some time to process the image from the camera before displaying it on the screen (or capturing it). A good way to illustrate this to point it out the side of a car at the grass verge when travelling at, say, more than 40mph or so. Everything that appears on the screen appears to “slant” to one side, such as telegraph poles, trees, etc.
The iPhone camera, at least on the original iPhone and the 3G model, was always a piece of crap. I’ve heard it’s better on the 3GS, but if your image was taken on a 3GS then maybe not
http://scalarmotion.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/propeller-image-aliasing/
Shutter speed vs propeller RPM. Science!
Its similar to when you hold a pen by on end and wave it. It looks like its bending. Also probably something to do with the shutter speed/scanning and the fact that you can watch film of propellors or car tires without it looking like its going backwards.
Ever watched a propeller start up. It looks like at one point it spins back the opposite way. It doesnt its your eyes being confused.
Focal plane artifact explained by Andrew Davidhazy here:
http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-focal-plane-artifacts-in-digital-cameras.html
It also happens on the BlackBerry. I’ve taken some similar pics myself.
It’s called “rolling shutter”, also know as “Jelly Lens” and is an effect present in CMOS sensors – the image isn’t taken in one snapshot, rather is ‘scanned’ from top to bottom.
If I am correct in thinking this (which I’m not) It’s because of the digital recording speed, and the way it records, it made this image. so when it started recording the image, the propeller was in one place, when it finished, it was in a whole other place. When I was in italy I moved my camera too fast after taking a picture and got a picture of an obelisk with an intensely curved shape. Same thing but it’s a propeller instead.
Richie is right, I’ve seen with my cameraphone that the way they take photos is by incrementally scanning along the photo, and the propellers were moving fast enough that they moved during the ‘scan’. I noticed this with mine in a club, where the flashing lights meant the top half of one photo was black and abruptly changed to bright white about halfway down, so in that case it was ‘scanning’ vertically – so top to bottom or vice versa. I don’t have the brainpower to verify if that would cause a pattern like the one in that photo but it seems right! =)
richie is right — this is called the ‘rolling shutter’ effect. There’s a YouTube video here that demonstrates why this results in the image you see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T055cp-JFUA&feature=player_embedded
Yeah, to save the image, the iPhone takes ‘slices’ of data from the camera (from left to right in your image) so by the time it comes to take the next ‘slice’ and save the data, the propellor has moved a fraction! Quite a cool effect, but annoying if you just want a standard image! Here’s another example (courtesy of @grantimahara) where the slices are taken from top to bottom (as it’s in landscape) : http://twitpic.com/mnhub
Well if you convert 2000 RPM into Hertz, it’s aproximatly 33.3 recuring. This is also the standard refresh rate of most standard defiinition video, which also ties in with what richie siad in an earlier comment.
its because the camera was scanning much slower than the propeller was moving
The iPhone camera scans the image area rather than having conventional shutter. Kind of like the old trick of running around the back of the big school photo group and appearing twice in the resulting photograph.
Richie is spot on I think – the iPhone camera doesn’t work in the same way as a normal one, it has a rolling shutter. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter)
Notice how there are more “tips” at the top than the bottom – cool example of the Doppler effect.
Notwithstanding, @richie is right,
Am I going to be the dashingly clever individual who’s going to tell everyone how it works?
No.
Very very cool though!
Richie is right. It’s called rolling shutter effect. The lines on the sensor are read sequentially. It’s a common problem with digital cameras. Wikipedia entry on this.
Used to get a similar effect looking at fan blades against a TV screen (the old CRT type, not the new LCDs). Looks like the fan blades are still, or moving slowly or even backwards. So I’d guess (if it’sreal) that the iPhone actually takes several pictures and combines them, at some kind of similar rate to the blade spinning – however I’d expect the blades to be darker or see-thru. Something along these lines though… Hmmm…
Can I assume that the propeller had two blades? If so, this could be due to the iPhone taking the picture in vertical strips and them stitching them together, normally quick enough to eliminate effects of this kind, but at 2000 rpm….
Perhaps the iPhone refresh rate has a weird wagon-wheel effect synchronisation with the propeller, and 2000rpm ~= 30rps, so maybe….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon-wheel_effect
As far as I know, the iphone camera captures it’s images in strips going from one edge to another (which one depends on orientation via accelerometer) very fast and as it captures each one it attempts to blend it with the previous bit. its usually pretty seamless as it’s so fast and nothing ever rotates fast enough to mess it up in day-to-day life. I once took a picture of a skateboard in midair with my iphone and it seemed as though it had been twisted, literally. but obviously the camera had caught it at each point and luckily was taken in landscape mode so the direction of capture matched the spin in such a way that the effect was achieved
In typical cameras, the sensor captures the scenery all at once and the image is exposed (whether on film or digitally). But the CMOS sensors on iPhones doesn’t do that – instead it scans from left to right. So if you use it to take something that is moving rapidly such as the propeller shown, you get a warped result.
The power of Google!
It’ll be the rolling shutter, like mentioned above. It scans across the image, usually just giving you a picture that looks like everything is leaning when you take a picture while moving. As it’s just the prop spinning, it only affects that. There’ll have been some link to the rpm and shutter speed.
In photographic film – the shutter rate speed decides how bright the image is (how much light is let in) If you photograph a river at different speeds its either crisp or blurred beautifully. But thats light travelling to hit the film. In digi stuff, the optical rate – as in the frequency that the lens oscillates to (i think about 60hz could be wrong) is slower than the fast moving propeller. But in its camara shake mode it tries to compensate and redraws these (best guesses) so you get beautifully distorted yet crisp images.
And If thats right I’ll eat one of Derrens winnits lol but seriously its probably that.
Cool.!
I want to find a prop plane and try it out.
The iPone uses a rolling shutter, as do many digital cameras. (Look on Wiki) You can see this best by holding the iPone horizontally and moving the camera left and right, vertical lines (like a door) appear slanted while moving.
Weirdly, (I’m viewing this on my iPod Touch) when I scrolled down the picture I first thought it was a picture of the Red Arrows aircraft display team. Then I thought it was the devil’s/Gordon Ramsay’s (Hell’s Kitchen) pitch fork.
I’d asume it would do with the shutter speed and how the iPod captures the image. I believe the camera on the iPhone is meant to be very poor, compared to the rest of the kit, a big let down.
Our lack of understanding of the difference of digital capture from the old film capture has lead to many photos yet to be explained, even now (just as Orbs). An interesting feature of digital capture is that infrared shows up.
Isn’t it something to do with the FPS (frames per second) that the camera captures and the speed of the propeller? There’s a similar video
on Youtube that’s video footage a camera captured of a double propellared helicopter flying but because of the reasons I’ve just given it looks like it’s hovering as the propellers don’t seem to move…
It’s because the iphone’s CMOS sensor doesn’t use a shutter but instead scans the image, almost line by line. Therefore if the subject is moving, or you move the iphone whilst taking a shot you end up with some pretty unusual effects.
There are some flickr groups on this (flickr seems a bit broken so http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_biggs/sets/72157605677015911/ this is all I could get to).
It’s an example of a type of Propeller Aliasing.
There’s a good and simple demonstration of how it works here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T055cp-JFUA&feature=player_embedded
It’s something to do with the part of the camera that reads the data out to the phone, it works as a tan(x) function and by the time it gets to another part new photons have arrived on the CCD… or something!
My original comment didn’t seem to appear.. I think, essentially, that it is because the iphone ‘scans’ from side to side and if something is moving quicker than it can scan then it only picks it up in certain places and then tries to ‘blend’ those images as it goes.
Now that, that is COOL.
It’s because the iPhone has a rolling shutter – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter
There’s another example here:
http://cameratoss.blogspot.com/2007/07/iphone-rolling-shutter-distortion.html
Something has happened to the image: there is no EXIF data. It does not suggest foul-play, but some kind of manipulation has happened between it being taken and uploaded here.
The reason I was looking for the EXIF data is to see what kind of iPhone was used. The camera in the original, 3G and 3GS models are all different, so recreating the image might not work with your iPhone.
However, the artefacts are caused by the lowish scan rate used to read the CCD data. Limited space in this comment box stops me from being able to explain in detail, but if somebody wants to contact me for a fuller explanation, I’ll be happy to provide one.
That surely is freaky deaky. Perhaps you should run a competition for the freakiest deakiest iPhone image out there (may be hard to beat this one though!)
I suspect it’s a rather boring and old fashioned issue of light and exposure time. Generally, the propeller is moving too fast for the iPhone to capture it but at certain points the sun (which I assume to be behind the taker’s left shoulder) increases the amount of light being reflected off the propeller to such a degree that it is picked up by the iPhone’s sensor. Next time you know you’re going to be near a plane take a more advanced camera and experiment with exposure times. Could be interesting…
it’s a similar effect to the old timeslice effect first pioneered by Douglas trumble for 2001 a space odyssey. it happens when the ccd scans across the frame as something moves through each scanline
How sure are we that this is an unaltered image?
This post explains it nicely:
http://scalarmotion.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/propeller-image-aliasing/
I think this is due to the way the iphone avoids (loosely avoids…) camera blur without a decent camera or proper zoom. It takes a burst of pictures in some conditions so what you are seeing is effectively a few pictures stitched together.
Correct me (anyone?) if im wrong.
Tom (Jest)
Yeah, I believe it’s a line scanning thing like Richie was talking about. Take a look at the propeller blade / line on the far right. The red tip was captured, then as it moved round the area of blade closer to the ‘base’ was captured, then by the time the camera had recorded the visual info for lower down the picture, the prop blade had continued its rotation, so the red tip was visible again, appearing twice in the same picture.
That’s what I reckon is going on, anyway.
My guess is that it’s nothing to do with the fact that the iPhone was involved and more a result of the angle of the light and the fact that the shutter speed is much slower then the propeller.
You can see from the shadow of the plane that the source of light, the sun, is more less over the left hand shoulder of the person taking the picture. Given that the shutter speed would be something like 1/100th or 1/200th of a second, the propeller has the time to make several revolutions while the picture is being taken.
So I think that the curved shape of the rotating propeller caught the sun light in such a way as to trace these lines. Cool Pic!
http://scalarmotion.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/propeller-image-aliasing/
This explains it quite well, has a video in there too.
this easy to explain, x=r2/3*3.14xyz (1/2r*2000)*abc………ehm, I have got no idea, but Richie’s explanation makes sense? Great image!
Slow scanning image sensor . . .
it’s definitely a hardware thing and not an optical illusion.
best 2 hypothesis are:
1. as Richie said: “i reckon its because the camera was scanning from side to side in this image.
and in the fraction of a second it took to complete each “slice” of the photo, the propeller moved through it creating these vertical bars.”
This 1st is possible but unlikely, cause it would need the ‘lucky’ of iphones scan frequency to matches the spinning.
2. some vertical alignment in iPhones camera sensor causing the ghosting and consequently disappearing high speed horizontal parts
Yea it’s because the iPhone has a rolling shutter You can recreate this by taking a photo while twisting the phone, it will make straight lines bendy.
It’s a variation on the wagonwheel effect, an artifact of how the iPhone samples. It doesn’t capture the whole image at once, rather it does vertical slices that each take a teeny bit of time to expose. This isn’t unique to the iPhone–cheap CCDs used in phones almost all display this effect.
spatial aliasing?
Richie has it pretty much spot on. In the same way with some images where the propeller is curved is down purely what part of the image is being sampled or captured at that given moment. It’s strange that apple have opted to take their images this way as it isn’t a conventional method of sampling. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. I believe the correct method for describing this in an interlaced image, as opposed to the more typical progressiv scan method.
It’s because the iPhone doesn’t take pictures the same way as most other devices. There’s flickr groups for these sorts of shots.
I can’t rind the technical explanation. It was on lifehacker though.
It’s a visualised beat frequency. Who took that lovely picture?
I agree with richie’s explanation: When you take a picture, the camera pixels fire one a time. By the time the later ones have fired, the propeller has already moved around a bit. So each pixel is seeing the image at a different point in time, hence the strange effect.
…in the olden days, we used to create beat effects with flames, bass sound and rotating mirrors. See Koenig’s manometric flame.
As someone wrote before, the iPhone actually takes the picture from right to left. You can see it quite clear in the following picture: http://pici.se/pictures/kiGpUwZXa.jpg
This picture was shot when the “pre-flash” of the digital camera went off, seen on the right side, and before the iPhone had taken the picture the main flash had gone off as well, as seen on the left side.
Richie is right I think. What happens with pixels drawn on a screen is that they are drawn from left to right one row at a time starting from the top (is studying Computer Games Technology and is why I know). Something similar probably happened in terms of taking the photo.
If they are vertical, it was probably because the iPhone was tilted horizontally. And because of the speed of the propellers, it is making what we can see still very solid-looking.
it looks like richie has the right idea…i think its does a progressive photo rather than all in one go..and the shutter speed must be quite fast so rather than it taking one quick photo and simply showing a stationary blade it takes multiple shots in quick succession to make up a full image and just happens to capture the blade in each one. So it’s probably to do with the software built into the phone that tells the camera that somethings moving fast and then the camera attempts to capture it.
I had a similar effect when I took this picture on my iphone: http://static.londonfgss.com/memberpics1174-albums693-picture5516.jpg
Hello Mr.Brown,
Just noticed your Twitter, the Answer you seek can be found here:
http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-focal-plane-artifacts-in-digital-cameras.html
I know a man at the National Gallery Science and imaging Department, should you like to learn more
Sebastian
Youtube video explains all, other page for interesting reading
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T055cp-JFUA
http://www.moillusions.com/2007/06/spinning-fan-optical-illusion.html
Probably related to the image stabilisation software in the camera ie adjusting for what it thinks is “camera shake”.
Now we know how the ghosts and the deja vu moments slip into our dimension… i-phones are the passport into the other worlds…
surely thats some kind of dreadful forgery? someone’s been at the clone brush on PhotoShop…
Gotta agree with Chris above. Reckon the pic is scanned rather than snapped in one go. Serendipitous slight mis-synchronization of the two frequencies (cam and propellor) create this effect IMO.
Al
My best guess would be that this has a lot less to do with an optical illusion of some sort and a lot more to do with the iPhone’s image rendering software. The iPhone is made to take basic still pictures and may not be as sophisticated as modern digital cameras for anything more than that. After taking in the image, compression and image skewing and all sorts of effects have to go on to render the image as viewable.
The iPhone has lots of bugs on it, so I reckon this is just one of the (cooler) ones. When it sees the blurry image of the propeller in vertical position it mistakenly renders it several times as we see here.
This is caused by the iPhone having a rather poor digital shutter. A decent digital camera will have a mechanical shutter or a digital shutter where the image is captured in an instant and then transferred to memory. Here, there isn’t a shutter to speak of, it scans the sensor in real time, column by column. If the image changes between scans, you get a right mess as shown here.
Most of what I’m about to say is largely guesswork, other than the simple experiment you can try yourselves.
Let’s start with that experiment. This shows how you can ‘see’ a similar effect with the naked eye. You will need: your hand, your eyes, a plastic comb or a pen – something about the same length, but long and thin – and a TV screen. I think this works better with older TV screens; CRTs are ideal. I could recreate the effect with my older LCD, but it’s much harder with my current model. Ideally, put the TV on a channel showing a fast moving image.
See the next post for the rest of this explanation…
You really need someone who knows how the iPhone takes pictures but there’s usually a solid mathematical reason for these types of illusions, like when you’re driving on the motorway and the wheels of the other cars look like they’re travelling backwards.
Sideward scanning would seem to explain the middle bits, but I don’t understand how the propellers at the edge seem so vertical. I assume there isn’t anything special about the propeller that would make it seem that way? That’s the main thing that’s confusing me – how vertical propeller images get from the centre to there, or how they’re flipped round to be vertical.
I think it’s because the phone takes several photos in sequence and everages them to reduce blur, in this case, the blades have all been combined seamlessly because of the iPhones software, but you have to agree, there is no blur.
Part 2.
Place the comb/pen/whatever between your thumb and forefinger and hold it in front of the TV screen, so that you see it in front of the screen. Now “waggle” it back and forth as fast as you can – preferably without moving your hand.
Unlike the propeller, the comb/pen/etc is just moving back and forth over about a quarter of a full rotation, whereas the propeller was rotating fully – but, if all the variables are just right, you should see the same effect; the comb/whatever seems to “bend” away from its straight shape, almost as though one end of it hasn’t moved with the rest.
Just over 50 characters left, so next post…
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cxmptAPYR-s/RnC6WF0TfJI/AAAAAAAABDo/0gvq6InEkcQ/s1600-h/IMG00005.jpg
The effect is similar to the above and is called strobing. You can see this effect when you point a video camera at a CRT monitor/television screen. The frame rate of the camera you hold will not be synchronised with the the scan field update rate of the monitor, so it will appear that large black bars cross the CRT screen. This was a problem when the BBC made telerecordings of programmes for resale/preservation and the monitor/camera went slightly out-of-synch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strobing
asdfffff
Part 3. This is where the guesswork comes in.
Given the nature of how TV screens are updated, and the speed, I think this is an optical illusion caused by a stroboscopic effect – the picture (ie the background light source) is being updated at a faster rate than the comb/etc is being waggled; and because it’s rotational (even though it’s backwards and forwards) the point furthest from your hand is covering a greater distance in the same amount of time than the end you are holding – so the different points of that object are moving at a different speed.
Bah! Part 4 next…
Its called a “rolling shutter” – this happens on CMOS based sensors. Classic iPhone cam is very much affected
Also, when you pan from left to right, you will see that straight lines will become slanted, just like the stream of water from a garden hose, when you spray from left to right.
its called rolling shutter. the imaging-chip begins at the top-left and scans every pixel. (left->right ,top->bottom)
because of the propeller spinning so fast, it changes ist position while the camera-chip scans.
the iphones imaging-chip is really slow (move the iphone with activated camera, and you will see it) , so it can’t capture the propeller “standing still” but takes something like a video in a picture. the time where the top-left pixel was scanned and the time were the bottom-right pixel where scanned has a big difference
tim
Part 4.
This combines to cause you to see different parts of the comb, at different points along its path – but according to how your eyes/brain works, you see those different parts at different points *all at the same time*.
With the iPhone/Propeller (shouldn’t that actually be propellor?) it’s a similar thing. The propeller is spinning at a high speed; the outer ends moving at a greater speed (covering more distance in the same amount of time as inner parts). And the phone itself stores the picture by recording the pixels starting at one point, presumably the top left, working along each row until it fills the required space.
To part 5..
Part 5.
Part 4 seems to have vanished for me, hopefully it’s not lost or disolved in some kind of spam prevention scheme!
But anyway, the upshot is that the iPhone picks up different parts of the propellor at different points as it ‘creates’ the image in memory, in the same way the eye does when waggling that comb – so you get some parts stored in one instant, and other parts – now moved – in another. Hence the bizarre, but rather pleasing image.
Ritchie is correct as all cameras pan from left to right when focusing on images, this can be seen amplified when pointing your camera at a tv screen it shows as black stobing bars because the tv picture is made up of 625 lines constantly scanning and refreshing, the resulting vidoe image seen shows the blanking patterning when the refreshed images clash. . . . . ,sorry for the geeky answer
I agree with richie that this is probably the equivalent of a slit scan technique caused by the delay of the pixels being read in from the chip into the memory. Looks like the frequency of the propeller rotation just hit the sweet spot there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit-scan_photography
this occours because the camera is digital, it samples the analogue image “slice by slice” by the time it takes the first slice the proppeller moved and the camera takes the slice form this and keeps going.
increasing the speed of the camera sampling rate will reduce this effect. id like to see pictures taken with a digital camera with a slower sample rate or a faster moving propeller
richie is right, by taking the photo with your iPhone, the camera processes not all pixels simultaneously but pixel after pixel from left to right beginning in the top left corner. When finished one line, it goes on to the next – and that is how an image is being produced digitally. Because it is made very fast you normally don’t see anything and the image is absolutely normal. But this time the propeller-engine was faster than the pixels can be processed and you can never see the blades horizontally. Vertical blades are faster to scan, as they are thin. Now scanning the horizontally positioned blades took longer than the propeller rotates.
Hah! And while typing that lot, others come along and just give the answer, which basically sums up what I said but using actual knowledge instead of guesswork. Nice.
The electronics in your Iphone take time to process each pixel, as they get to the next pixel the blades have moved, At 2000 RPM the prop will move in an arc of 33.33 degrees or 1/3 of a revolution each second. Your Iphone chose a shutter speed, your picture is probably 1600×1200 pixels, meaning 1920000 pixels need to be recorded in that shutter open time. Blades at bottom are slightly nearer you, The electronics took a sort of stroboscopic picture of the blades, with the different shapes produced by stroboscopic means, and because of top to bottom variations of the angle of the blades plus a number of other factors. (need more room)…. ;D
bad phone camera.
http://scalarmotion.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/propeller-image-aliasing/
It’s either one of the complex camera-fault explanations posted on here, or the very essence of the universe itself is breaking down. Brilliantly weird photo, like something out of Ripley’s ‘Believe it or Not!’ museum.
Just as a point of interest, this sort of effect isn’t unique to iPhones or even digital cameras.
Old film cameras where at higher shutter speeds the shutter forms a ‘slit’ which moves over the film plane exhibit the same effect; this is typical on old large-format press cameras with a focal plane shutter.
The same effect is why in old photos of motor races the wheels don’t appear round but ‘lean’ backward.
it’s Gods way of telling you you’re stood too close to a spining propellor!
I’m pretty sure that the best explanation for this is that god made it that way to test our faith in him.
They look like matchsticks
It’s all to do with shutter speeds as well as how many fps is being stored. Similar things happen with light art as well as wheels moving backwards which with a joint effort creates this effect.
@ariel – and how does that work..?
@ariel – nice try, but I’m afraid it’s a known fact that God shoots film, not digital.
Anyone who has stood in a darkroom and watched the magic as the image develops on a sheet of photo paper will know this to be indubitably true.
I dunno… looks to me like you’ve got a lil gremlin in the picture processing dept… one that likes to play with photoshop perhaps, lol.
Is that a WW2 warbird?
Pax, amor et concordia.
x
is the image created using photoshop?
I would guess that this is probably due to the camera software reading the rows in order; in the nanoseconds between each row being read, the propellor has moved enough to create the effect. The elegant vertical line effect is a happy coincidence between the rate at which the iPhone software polls the CCD, and the speed the propellor is moving.
Looks very odd. I think its not real! Some kind of camera trickery
Looks very odd. I think its not real and is the result of some kind of software or camera trickery
Ehehehe …… optical illusion you say huh?!
This is not due to iphone .. this is a special type of rotor that can be used for combat …
Pretty sure, it was just a commercial trick. Any publicity and so on…
a plane with spikes
…reminds me of that whole ‘flying rod’ business from years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amnNgXRK_vo
After all the kerfuffle about virtually invisible alien cave dwelling creatures that zip about unnoticed, except by video camera, at 100mph (seriously!) died down, some people started to feel a bit foolish. Turns out it’s just some freaky effect that you get when insects fly in front of video cameras, but some things are just too good not to believe in occasionally. Pity they don’t have cackling old women on their backs!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEurk1JPo-w&feature=related
love and respect
zenp.x
[...] from Derren Brown Blog [...]
i find it hard to beleive that if that prop was spinning at 2000rpm you would be standing that close.
However that was done, that is still one very odd looking image. Very strange indeed…… (sorry, nothing more meaningful to say than that!)
LC x
I’m sure this is where SC would say this was down to Criss Angel.
are yoou sure it hasn’t been edited on a computer?
I’ve seen that happening too. I’ve attached a shot from my iPhone but it seems to work with most camera phones. When I took this shot I tried taking the same image with my digital camera and the optical illusion didn’t happen. I’d asked a few tech-savvy friends why this was going on and they back up what Tim posted above.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rdub/3732616314/
- heh – that’s excellent – Phillis
wow that pic looks like you took it when it was in air….how did u manage to do that. Thats cool.
i reckon, he just used photoshop to give u people to think about something
it s called aliasing
can i be a swine and use the old argument of “well, if i can replicate that phenomenon using other means…then you MUST be using trickery too…”
just playing devil’s advocaat obviously…
- sure Iain say what you like – it’s not our photo and several examples are coming in that look rather too good to be photoshopped. – Phillis
that’s definitely not shopped
I took a similar picture on my own:
http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs229.snc1/7628_1039686729890_1757203945_75848_3242017_n.jpg
So who here is smart enough to stand in front of a moving propellor to take the photo?