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Your cell phone camera's unintended "rolling shutter" effect

By Rain Noe - August 27, 2010

in Tech | Object Culture

Check out these cell-phone-camera shots of airplane propellors, victim to an effect known as "rolling shutter."

What gives? As Flickr user Jason Mullins explains,

[I shot this with] an iPhone 4, and the scanning typically goes from top left to bottom right so moving objects lean to the left. Essentially any electronic shutter camera (i.e. not an SLR like mechanical shutter) will give these effects. Wikipedia has some good articles here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter

For those who want to try this out, just point your simple electronic shutter camera at an object moving parallel to you, preferably fast, and take the photo. The faster the relative speed between you, the more the distortion. Rotating objects go really weird!

Hit the jump to see more examples, this time shot by Soren Ragsdale.

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Warren

12 years ago

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this was a problem with my GoPro camera, when I mounted it directly to my motorcycle. The vibrations of the motorcycle, for whatever reason, seemed to bring out the worst of the camera's rolling shutter effect... videos of stationary objects gave the impression of very flexible/bendy/wiggly buildings and objects.
Rather than having a stationary camera viewing moving objects, this situation was a case of a moving camera observing stationary objects.
Thanks for sharing these pics!
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Pasach

13 years ago

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So cool. I have to go get my own!
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Greg Tada

14 years ago

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I witnessed this phenomenon when I took pictures from a Shinkansen (bullet train) in Japan. The buildings all looked like they were leaning 15-20 degrees.
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xPatriicK

14 years ago

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That's really cool! Especially the last two :P
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Jayphen

14 years ago

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This is a cool example of the effect on a stationary object: http://cl.ly/bfe2fbb2ad149fc9e1e1 (taken in Sydney, at the beginning of the harbour bridge northbound)
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cupido

14 years ago

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This a common effect known as "aliasing" which we encounter often in medical imaging. An extreme everyday example is watching a car commercial (or the wagon wheels in an old Western movie) in which the wheels are actually turning opposite to the direction the in which the vehicle is moving.
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Scott

14 years ago

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That's pretty awesome
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