Figure this one out....

[RogueXD]

I'll tell you what I know. This is NOT altered in any way!!! These were taken by my daughter on her way to MEPS. It was taken with an old digital camera with no preview window. She had no clue they turned out this way until after we uploaded them. Now I can understand that if the shutter speed was slow, you'd get a streaking type effect, but why did the prop blades turn out this way??? Any good photographers out there??? Any Ideas?? Once again, these are not chopped or altered in any way!! I have about 12 of them in different angles.

[XDMarshall]

Pics with my iPhone come out that way, looks cool to me.

[carhartt]

Its how the shutter takes the picture. It happens when you have a prop turning fast and the shutter going too slow. Get a really good camera and it goes away. Basically, its a different location the further up/down you go on the photo.

But it does look cool.

[Jarhead1987]

If the shutter speed is slow, it would blur the blades. It would take a fast shutter speed to "freeze" the blades like this.

I can't explain the effect where they look detached.

[ericc40]

i think it's due to the slow shutter speed... but it looks REALLY cool though~~

[RogueXD]

If its slow shutter speed, then why are the props in a different direction than they turn??

[MagicPie]

My expertise is largely in regards to motion picture cameras, and shutter speeds play a bit of a different role, for most part however it sort of the same.

My hunch would be:

The shutter and the speed of the blades happen to be in a rough sync- mixture of a fast shutter, and too slow of a shutter, and the blades following right in place with so no motion blur is capture.

To explain further, the blades are so fast, that typically they would blur on a slow shutter, on a fast shutter they would pause. However if your shutter is timed somewhat oddly, to that of the motion, you get this stepping.

This is exaggerated by the fact it's a old camera, and so the processing speed and sensitively of the CCD are likely very poor.

Your grabbing bits of the blade when they present the most surface area for the camera's CCD to pick up on. As the blades continue to rotate, and to the point where their profile is smaller from that view point, the CCD on the camera can not pick up on them, due their extreme speed. '

If this was a film camera, or a higher end digital camera, you may very well never get this result. You just happen to see the side effects of a cheap or old camera, trying to do something that ideally you use a high end camera to do-capture fast motion

As far as the blades appearing to rotate backwards, that of course is just how fast motion presents itself, the camera again is not good enough to capture the true direction.

The detached look, is again the low surface area, and it even faster speed being close to center. The camera can not pick up on such fast speed, and tiny viewable surface area.

Originally Posted by XDMarshall

Pics with my iPhone come out that way, looks cool to me.

And the iphone, has the camera technology of a odd school digital camera, so no surprise you find similar results. Not to mention they have a very tiny and low sensitive CCD.


You can play this effect out, when a video camera, and a TV, by timing your shutter at different rates, but not at 1/60, you see the staging of the fresh rate. A still camera too can capture this, but the effect would be harder to tell unless you really took a bunch of time, and to happened to nail the shutter timing to that of the TV perfectly. To which by chance the photos above happen to do with the prop.

[ArmyGuy45]

Dude.. if thats your prop on the plane... prepare for a hard landing!


Slow shutter with they way the light hit it.

[swift]

Digital cameras scan small portions of the scene where a film camera shutter exposes all or most of the scene at one time, depending on the type of shutter. If the scan begins, say, in the upper left of the scene where one blade of the prop is in a certain position, that image is recorded. As the scan continues, another identical blade is in position in another portion of the scene to be scanned, giving the appearance of two blades in the image, but not in the same place. This process continues throughout the entire image giving an interesting look to the final product. The whole thing is analogous to wagon wheels rotating backwards in western movies.