Picture this: a bride-to-be, doing the usual pre-wedding thing, trying on a bridal gown and taking photos in front of a mirror. Normally, that's where a story like this would end, right? Just a standard, uneventful moment. But not this time. Instead, it marked the beginning of an eerie, almost surreal tale that somehow involves an iPhone and possibly the Matrix.
The jury's still out on that one, but trust me, it gets weird.
From Western Journal:
When British comedian Tessa Coates looked over the photos of herself trying on wedding dresses, she wasn’t expecting that the resulting photos would make her question her own grasp on reality.
On Nov. 4, Coates posted the photo on her Instagram account, describing how this “glitch in the matrix/photo … made [me] nearly vomit in the street.” A little hyperbolic at first glance, but upon further examination of the photo, her reaction doesn’t seem that far off the mark.
Standing in front of two mirrors in the bridal shop, the photo captured Coates and her two reflections in three distinctly different poses. According to Coates, the photos were not photoshopped or altered in any way — they were taken with a normal iPhone camera, with normal photo settings.
And yet, her three poses are nothing alike: Her arms are in completely different positions in each pose.
So, what the heck happened? Well, according to an expert named Roger, there’s a really good explanation. The Western Journal piece goes on:
According to a man identified only as Roger, an employee at an Apple store to whom Coates took the photo, the image was the result of the iPhone’s photo stitch feature, according to the U.K. Mirror.
“It’s made like an AI decision and it stitched those two photos together,” he said, according to the report.
Roger told Coates “the iPhone is not a camera, it’s a computer,” photography news site PetaPixel reported.
Scanning from left to right, “it takes a series of burst images very quickly even though it’s not a panoramic or a burst.”
PetaPixel explained, “People may not be aware of this, but when they click the shutter on their smartphone it takes multiple images and chooses the best elements in a very short space of time.
It's a bit unsettling, isn't it? I understand there's a reason behind it and, sure, it's all about technology, but it's still weird. Maybe it's time we considered going old-school with a Polaroid camera?
