by admin | August 26th, 2010
Wave Chopper
Is this picture of a helicoptor photoshopped? The blades appear curved?
A friend and I were trying to figure out whether or not this could be a real photograph.
http://www.photoblog.com/ScreamingCactus/2008/05/03/
Someone suggested the camera was vibrating from pressure waves when the image was taken, but I think that would make the whole picture wavy, not just the blades.
Someone suggested they could be bent because they are accelerating, but I know chopper blades can't bend because it relies on their angle to navigate, also it's already in the air.
The shadows seem to check out, however the shadow of the "middle" blade looks like the shadow of a straight blade.
The one thing that really makes me think "Photoshop!" is because the two opposite blades are curved in opposite direction, which makes no sense.
I've seen plenty of other pictures of choppers in the air, none looked like this.
If this photo were taken with an old-fashioned film camera with a focal plane shutter, it is possible that the shutter "scanned" the image onto the film, with different parts of the image (in time) being put onto the film. A focal plane shutter, at any decent speed, is like a slit moving across in front of the film. The slit moves with a fixed speed, the width of the slit determines the time the film "sees" the image. On a picture with rapid movement, the result can be a distortion like you see here.
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