Watch The Weird Effect Caused By The iPhone’s Camera In These Guitar Strings [Video]

We’ve had fun with the iPhone’s rolling shutter before, but this video’s especially neat because it illustrates what a rolling shutter does in real time by capturing a guitar’s vibrating strings.

What’s a rolling shutter, and how’s it different from any other type of shutter? With a normal shutter, a camera quickly opens and closes a small window beneath the lens, letting light in and burning the resulting image into the film. With the iPhone, though, the camera works more like a scanner, starting from one side of the image and capturing the image pixel by pixel until it stops at the other side.

What that means is that if you have something that is rotating or vibrating fast enough, you can end up with some truly Daliesque images using the iPhone 4. That’s exactly what is happening here with this YouTube guitarist, who notes that the movement of the plucked strings is “non-representative” of how strings actually vibrate.

I’ll say. Pretty cool none the less, though, right?

[via 9to5Mac]

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.