I have a Nikon D5000 camera. I also have a 2006-vintage cell phone with a built in camera. Oddly, the cell phone camera doesn’t get much use. Still, on the recent B-17 flight I took some cell phone photos, just to send them to someone while flying around (and, yes, the cell phone worked while in flight).
The cell phone camera is a cheap piece of crap compared to the Nikon, or even a simple point-n-click. As a result, the images are both small in size, and low in quality. But they provide an interesting view of the propellers. Due to the “rolling shutter” effect, the propeller moves a fair amount during the exposure. But rather than being simply blurred, it gets… mutated.
Interestingly, while the digital photos taken with the Nikon do not exhibit these motion artifacts, a brief bit of video taken with the same camera does exhibit this in spades.
6 Responses to “B-17 by Cell Phone”
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Google some high power rocket fin flutter videos. Some of our more credulous fliers thought that .125 inch G10 fiberglas could flutter like a flag in the breeze….
-Braz
Are you sure those weren’t the rubber safety props?
cool surrealistic picture in style of Man Ray and Salvatore Dali
Man Ray?
This is the first example I’ve seen showing two propellers in the same shot.
It looks like the effect is more pronounced the closer you get to the camera.
weird.
I mind some pictures of race cars taken around, say, 1905, with early focal-plane shutters in the cameras. The cars seem to be leaning forwards.
I got to crawl around in a B-17 when it was on the ground. Went back as far as the tail gun position. I would hate to have to bail out from there. Did you know that the B-17 had a symmetrical wing section, just like a control-line combat airplane?
Then, of course, there is one of my two or three favorite poems: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.