Over the weekend, some parts of the internet were fixated on figuring out why an otherwise normal photo of a bride trying on wedding dresses turned out so bizarre.
At first glance, there’s nothing strange about the image—simply a bride standing in front of two mirrors in a wedding dress. However, if you look closely at the bride and both mirrors, you’ll see she’s striking in a different pose in all three locations, all within the same photo.
The bride in question, Tessa Coates, took to her socials to ask the internet for an explanation. Coates swore the photo was just a normal snapshot taken on an iPhone 12, with no added effects or features like Live Photo or panoramic. She even shared a screenshot of the metadata of the photo as proof:
With all this in mind, the situation was a bit of a stumper. How could a standard photo capture three different poses at once? Coates shared on her story that she visited an Apple Store, where a Genius told her that it was the result of the iPhone taking multiple frames at once, then intelligently stitching them together. That is, for simplicity’s sake, how an iPhone takes HDR photos, however, it doesn’t seem to be the cause here. MKBHD writer and researcher David Imel didn’t even think the photo was real, poking holes in HDR theory, as the process happens way too fast to allow for photographing multiple poses.
Spoiler alert: It was panoramic mode all along
However, the case seems to have been solved. Faruk from the YouTube channel iPhonedo highlighted that the resolution of the photo (3028 x 3928) isn’t the standard resolution of an iPhone 12 image. When Faruk took a photo on his iPhone 12, the resolution comes back as 3024 x 4032. A small difference, but the clue Faruk needed to figure out what was going on. He correctly identified this resolution as being a panoramic photo after all, even though the photo wasn’t labeled as “Pano” as they usually are. As it turns out, if you don’t move the iPhone enough when taking a panoramic shot, it won’t label the photo as Pano. Go figure.
Panoramic shots work by taking a lot of photos in succession as you move the camera from left to right. It then stitches those photos together, to create the illusion of one long image. So, based on Faruk’s theory, what most likely happened here was Coates’ photographer actually took the photo in Pano mode, but didn’t move the camera enough to register as as panoramic photo. However, they moved it just enough to take multiple photos of the scene, including Coates in three different poses. The left mirror was captured first, then Coates herself, then, finally, the mirror on the right.
You should be able to replicate the situation yourself, at least with one mirror. If you place your subject in the frame with at least one mirror to their side, switch to Pano mode in the camera app, then take a photo slightly moving the phone left to right, the subject in the mirror should look different than they do themselves.
On to the next internet mystery.
