Monday, June 15, 2015

Mirrored Preview, Unmirrored Result

Yesterday I was in New York for the day, and after my business was done I took the IRT up to Morningside Heights and walked around a bit, on a sort of nostalgia tour, recalling my 2 years attending Columbia University. It may be that "attending" is not quite the right word for the way I handled my studies, but, be that as it may, I was there for 2 intense years.

I took a selfie outside Tom's Restaurant, intending to share it with my son. He's a fan of the old Seinfeld show, and some footage of the restaurant's exterior was frequently used on the show.

I noticed something I had never noticed before: the iPhone selfies preview as mirror-image, but finalize as non-mirror-image. I noticed because my selfie had a word in it. So the preview, when I was snapping the selfie, looked like this:



I was quite surprised, even disoriented by this.

Afterwords, in the photo folder, it looked like this:



I know that someone at Apple thought this through,
but I didn't have a clue.
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2 comments:

Charlie McDanger said...

I suspect it makes recomposing the shot more intuitive based on our species' experience with mirrors, but I would have to hold an iPhone to verify this.

11:28 AM
John Enright said...

I suspect you're right! I mean, I had never noticed the issue before, but I have occasionally used the iphone as a mirror - so perhaps it should have dawned on me.

7:45 PM

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