The Sublime Hypnotism of Digital Cameras' Rolling Shutter Effect

I recently came across this video. It was shot with an iPhone that was duct taped to the center of a wheel of car that scooted around a parking lot at up to 30 mph.

It might not look like much—a little fish-eye'd, maybe—but it's a prime example of a stroboscopic curiosity unique to the age of digital video, one that takes on seemingly any form imaginable through the lenses of DSLR, RED, and other camera technologies kitted with CMOS (complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor) sensors.

A glitch, if you'd like to call it that. Others know it as the rolling shutter effect.

This is essentially what happens when you simultaneously playback all parts of an image's frame that weren't all shot simultaneously. It's the result of moving, or rolling, a camera's shutter over an exposure window, rather than letting photons hit your camera's sensors all in one go. At least that's the gist. Here's a deeper overview, if you're curious.

Depending on shutter speed, exposure time, and the direction (lateral or vertical; it works both ways) you scan a frame, you'll get all manner of distorted wobbles, smears, and skews. For example, when an iPhone captures an image, explains the blog Evil Window Dog, the makers of the above video, "it scans the camera input top to bottom and this takes time. Because the rotation speed of the camera is close to the scanning speed, straight lines turn to curved ones."

It's a camera trick that can play with whatever object(s) happen to be in frame in ways that make them appear to exist beyond all known laws of space and time. Suddenly, real-time footage of a speaker monitor emitting a 61Hz sine wave tone seems to wobble in super slow-mo:

YouTube user drummaboy5189 shot this clip at 60 frames-per-second on a DSLR set to a near-instantaneous shutter speed of 1/4000 of a second. To prove his video hasn't been messed with, and indeed plays at full speed, he waves his fingers in front of the cone.

We can be relatively sure this guitar string clip is playing back in real-time, too. Again with the hands:

There's no finger confirmation in this footage of this fan's blade, but seriously, look at that smear:

Here's something similar, shot out the window of a propeller plane:

It gets better, stranger, more static. Even something as untamed and elemental as water can be flung akimbo by rolling shutters, as seen in the video below. As PetaPixel explains, "by pressing a water tube against a speaker, bibio was able to control the vibration frequency of the water flowing through the tube. He then adjusted the pulses of the water to match up with the frame rate of his Canon 5D Mark II."

Oh wow:

Sometimes, you get perfect synchronization between object speed, shutter speed, and exposure time. Look at the blades on this Russian military chopper, coming in for landing. If I didn't know any better, I'd think the rotors were fixed. But they are indeed whipping around:

That's arguably the most widely seen rolling shutter video out there. The piss-poor upload quality has always been a bit of a bummer, but it's nonetheless quite trippy.

Of course, there are those who criticize the rolling shutter effect, who shell out on various hardware and editing software designed to correct for inadvertent real-time warps. Shutter distortion? "You don't want that," they say. In certain instances, they're totally right.

But in a moment when warping the world is as easy as strapping your phone to a tire and upping the clip to the Internet, is it so wrong to have a good time playing with "real time"? Let's be real, time.