The Sickest Selfies Ever

    The sickest selfie ever taken was on July 20th 1969, on the Moon. Now, looking at this, it may not seem like a selfie at first. It's just a regular picture of Buzz Aldrin.

    But look closer! Neil Armstrong is also in this picture... On Buzz's visor! He's taking the picture! It's a mirror selfie!

    A couple decades later and a couple hundred million kilometers away, the Curiosity Mars rover takes a picture of itself. You can't see it holding the camera. Why? Because this isn't actually just one picture. It's a combination of several pictures it took throughout the day, which were then stitched together into a whole image as a sort of photo-collage. Its arm was always left out of the parts that were stitched together.

    In a way, though, a lot of pictures we take are also "photo-collages", because a lot of cameras don't capture the entire image simultaneously. They use what is called a "rolling shutter" where it starts capturing the image from one side and continues to scan towards the other side. In the case of digital cameras, each row (or column) of pixels is captured separately and "stitched together" to form the final picture. So in a way, your average phone selfie is also a photo-collage, slice-by-slice.

    This can sometimes lead to interesting results, like people having different facial expressions than their reflections in the photo. Because they changed it after the shutter had already scanned past them.

Blink | No blink

Now let's go back a couple centuries, and back down to Earth; to 1434 in Bruges. Jan van Eyck has just finished his latest painting, a portrait of the merchant Arnolfini and his wife.

    The first thing you might notice about this painting is that the dude has a bigass hat and looks like Jamiroquai.

    The second thing you might notice is this quality of still mundanity you might not expect from a staged painting. The sandals just off to the side, presumably of the merchant who is only wearing socks. The oranges laid both on top of a cabinet as well as one on the windowsill. The string of beads hanging off of a nail on the wall.

    The third thing you might notice is the dog. It sort of reminds me of the secret hidden dog from Picasso's Le Moulin de la Galette. In the final version of that painting, there's just this nondescript black heap in the foreground. You might assume that it's a chair with someone's coat over its back, or something. But they x-rayed the painting and what do you know, that's descriptly a dog.

    After having noticed all that, you might notice the mirror at the back of the room. It reflects all of the contents of the room. You can see the backs of the man and the woman (his hat seeming just as big from this angle), and the oranges in front of the window, and the dog, and a door that opens up to the rest of the house. There are two people in the doorframe.

    I'm assuming one of them is the painter himself, Eyck, which would make this one of the sickest and also the most time-consuming selfies ever. Who is the other person, though? Maybe it's an assistant of some sort, or a butler. Or maybe, it's you and I, the perspective character looking at the scene! Like how you can see Duke Nukem in the mirror in Duke Nukem 3D.

"Damn, we're looking good"

images:

Moon selfie

Mars selfie

Rolling shutter

Cat
Arnolfini portrait
Jamiroquai

Dog

Duke