Fun with rolling shutter!

[M. Gilden]

I know we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to work around our CMOS rolling shutter problems, but some folks have embraced it and come up with some really interesting effects!

Fan blades, propellers, guitar strings (< my favorite!), and more- I'm starting this thread as a sort of starting point to post fun and interesting use of the rolling shutter effect.

In case you're unaware of the phenomenon (or how it can possibly be used for good instead of evil), check out this blog:
http://techcitement.com/hardware/tech-tricks-and-tweaks-fun-with-rolling-shutter/

Lets see what you guys got!

 

[M. Gilden]

Follow up with my favorite example so far (also appears in the link above):

 

[Luke]

Agreed, the guitar one is my favorite as well. The propeller one is pretty trippy.

 

[M. Gilden]

My favorite response on the propeller video:
"Whoever was trying to ship all those boomerangs sure is gonna be pissed"

LOL

Anyone have any other interesting effect examples? Or have any ideas to try of their own?

 

[HansSteinert]

I'm shooting a promo vid right now, and one of the shots was tracking a car. The wheels look like they're spinning the wrong way.

 

[TooTallTim]

That's nothing to do with rolling shutter - http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/sci_update.php?DocID=51

 

[M. Gilden]

Right, I think the wheels backward thing is called "stroboscopic", which is much more like a strobe-light effect. With a strobe light, you only see the moment the light is on, and miss whatever happened while it is off. Which each exposure of your wheels spinning, the backward effect is due to your shutter speed, frame rate, and speed of the wheels turning- you are exposing the frame when the next spoke appears right behind where the previous one was, so it looks like it is going the wrong direction.

If timed perfectly, you can get an even curiouser Stroboscopic effect where the wheels can actually appear to NOT be moving at all! Check out this footage of a helicopter:

Meanwhile, while still a very interesting effect, TooTallTime already pointed out this is different from rolling shutter. Its not at all unique to our DSLRs. In fact, I've noticed stroboscopic wheels on television since I was a kid.
Rolling shutter, meanwhile skews and distorts the shape of images in the frame due to the way the image is recorded (see my article linked above for details).