pic: Digital cameras do strange things

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

... theres more going on in this photo than meets the eye.

The only thing going on in the scene was a guy standing in the fairway swinging a golf club. The .jpg file was captured by pointing a digital camera at the guy and pressing the button. After that I cropped out the periphery to get the file size under the CD Media limit. No trickery.

What I'm wondering is how did the digital camera come out with what we see here? Certainly different sections of the image were captured at different times during the (back)swing -- but why? Was the camera trying to compensate for the moving subject? I'm hoping someone out there knows how these thing work.

To get an idea of the timescale: a top golfer (e.g., Tiger Woods) achieves club head speed at impact greater than 150 feet per second. The swing arc is about 10 feet top to bottom, so minimum downswing time would be about 0.07 second. Typical golfers like this guy would swing more slowly, and if the image was captured during his back swing, the elapsed time from lower to upper club position could be as much as 0.5 second -- although there is no advantage to it, average golfers tend to take the club back quicker than that. Like Ken, I'd have expected parts of the .jpg to be a blur, but what you see is what I got.