01-06-2006 17:26

Greg Marra

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

That is pretty nuts. I have never seen anything like that. Once, at the MoS in Boston, I took a picture of the lightning show and there was the top half lit up and the bottom half dim, but I don't know how you would get something like what you have.

Sweet!

01-06-2006 17:31

Richard Wallace

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

I'm guessing the time that the camera took to scan from the top to the bottom of the image was just about the same as the time it took the golfer to swing the club down.

01-06-2006 18:06

Jonathan Norris

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

I understand that, but why are there 2 golf balls?

01-06-2006 18:15

Cuog

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

the second is actually there for the next person to swing

01-06-2006 20:39

DonRotolo

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

It's a trick: He is not moving during the photo, he's actually got a club that looks exactly like that. That gap in the club leading to the upper part is held that way by magnetics....

pretty cool.

Don

01-06-2006 21:12

geeknerd99

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

Something to do with the flash curtain-sync?

Dang, that's pretty weird.

01-06-2006 21:17

xzvrw2

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

i seen it and said woah

haha
pretty sweet

01-06-2006 21:44

anna~marie

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

I'd almost say you should buy a new camera... but hey I wonder what other kinds of cool pictures you can get with it!

01-06-2006 21:51

Morgan Gillespie

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

Like said before he hasn't swung yet, it is a two sided golf club, after he swings it he plans to swing it all the way around again and hit the other ball in one quick Darth Maul type swoop.

01-06-2006 22:41

JulieB

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

One good back swing but then again I really don't understand golf. That is pretty cool.

Four!!
look out breaking golf club that is not actually breaking.

01-06-2006 23:09

JaneYoung

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

I have read this 4 times and have laughed out loud all 4 times.
I think I'm going to have to put myself in some kind of time out from JulieB posts.
That might be good.

02-06-2006 01:29

s_forbes

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

I like how the club is shown in two different positions, but the golfers hands (and the rest of him for that matter) are photographed in one position that does not match either position of the club. It almost seems like someone is trying to trick us...

But after further inspection, it does look like the camera was capturing row by row as the golfer swung. I guess I learned something new today, and that is that digital cameras do work in strange and mysterious ways.

02-06-2006 01:35

MrForbes

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

if you look close you can see a smear of the head of the club pretty much in line with where it should be for the position the golfer's hands are in. I agree that it's most likely the scan time is about equal to the time it took to move the club from top to bottom, and the picture was taken at just the right time to get both "slow" club positions to show up, but miss most of the "fast" movement of the club at the center of the swing.

02-06-2006 04:09

David Brinza

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

Maybe the scan is from bottom up and we're looking at the backswing.

If the picture was taken on the downswing, I'd expect the clubhead to be really blurred just before impact with the ball. (In a good golf swing, max clubhead speed should be just as the club is striking the ball).

I think there are some digital cameras where the entire CCD is "gated" for a fixed exposure time and the readout is done after the exposure. You wouldn't see the effect observed in photo - the club would only appear in one portion of the swing, perhaps blurred.

02-06-2006 09:04

Richard Wallace

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

Good catch! That's the most reasonable explanation I've heard yet. The golfer's foot positions are also more consistent with a backswing.

02-06-2006 13:54

Rosiebotboss

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

I'd like to see this try to be duplicated.

Maybe I can conduct some tests during the R^2 Challenge Cup at next week's 5th Annual Tournament of Rosie. <shameless promotion>

Still a few spots left!! see www.team839.com for more information. Or PM me.

02-06-2006 18:06

KenWittlief

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

a few years back I had my photo taken for my drivers license.

I can only surmize the camera they used scanned your face from left to right, because I was watching someone walking across the room as they took my photo

and it came out with my eyes pointing in different directions, ala Son Of Marty Feldman

thats what was on my drivers license for 4 years!

02-06-2006 18:19

Bill_Hancoc

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

Agree because if you look at the direction of the club is curved it looks like the club stayed put while he swung back

02-06-2006 21:17

KenWittlief

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

there is one aspect of the picture that leads me to think it has been photoshopped to some degree

if the club is captured in different parts of the swing, then why is there no blur in his hands, esp the white glove?

How did he move the club without moving his hands?

something else I just noticed, there is a discontinuity in the club -the upper club does not connect to the 'lower club'

It looks somewhat like strobe light photos with an unsynchronized shutter plane (maybe not really a digital photo?) It looks like the man was shot in the dark with maybe two flashes, and then superimposed onto a photo of the golf course?

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

03-06-2006 09:02

Richard Wallace

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

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.

03-06-2006 10:29

KenWittlief

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

ok, if you took the photo then you have a real puzzle on your hands, and as an engineer I expect you to do what engineers do and run some tests on that camera

maybe take photos of a white pole moving diagonally across the image plane, maybe one top to bottom, and one left to right.

Maybe the camera has two CCDs (to get higher resolution) and they are not perfectly synchronized?

Maybe there is a bug in the camera firmware that causes it to not read the CCD from top to bottom. Maybe the capture and hold circuit is not working correctly.

Maybe you had the camera in some weird priority mode that kept the arpeture closed down and slowed the effective shutter speed way down.

Inquisitive minds want answers! :^)

03-06-2006 11:08

Alex Cormier

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

reminds me of this picture i took at FLR this year.

03-06-2006 15:13

sanddrag

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

Some family friends once took a digital picture and it came out weird like this. The camera was set on a table, the timer was set, and then the guy who set the timer ran in to join the group shot. He made it in well before the timer expired and the shot was taken. However, when the picture was viewed, he was transparent (and only him too). I could see the fireplace in detail right behind him even though he was standing in front of it and nothing in the picture was blurred indicating he was moving quickly as the shutter closed. Everything was crystal clear, but he was transparent. It was very strange.

03-06-2006 16:31

Richard Wallace

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

Right now I'm just looking for a few reasonable hypotheses to test. Thanks for providing some.

Since I've never seen a similar effect before, it doesn't seem reasonable to assume the conditions that caused it will be easy to reproduce. In situations like that, my experience has been that some time spent up front designing the experiment will reduce the time spent later repeating tests that fail to reproduce the effect I'm trying to study.

03-06-2006 16:40

KenWittlief

Re: pic: Digital cameras do strange things

Ive seen a similar effect on older digital cameras when a flash is used indoors.

They were not very good about choosing between long exposure times and triggering the flash, so sometimes it would do both, leaving the shutter open for a good part of a second, then firing the flash as well. This would explain the long exposure catching the fireplace, then the flash catching the person infront of it, making him transparent.

Richard, since digital photos are free one experiment you might try: take a black computer fan and paint a straight white line on one blade, or all the way across from blade tip to blade tip.

If you power the fan with an adjustable DC supply you should be able to vary its speed, and take some test shots (or you could give it a spin with your finger)