Images That Aren’t Really There Show up in photos and bideos

I don't see anything out of the ordinary in the first picture. I do see the grey object in the second picture.

Please take a picture of something like a white wall under daylight conditions. It doesn't have to be a wall but should be something that isn't reflective and doesn't have any distracting details of its own.

Those screenshots look as though you've zoomed in as far as you can. If so, what you're seeing are probably just artifacts.

Can you show us a picture at normal resolution?

Can you take a screenshot and show us?

What I see in the gray picture is what is called digital noise. In digital pictures, the brightness is represented by a number between 0 and 255, maybe like 203 or 204. But the thing is, there's no 203½. So, to get you to see a smooth change of brightness, there are patches of 203s and patches of 204s together. You don't see it until you zoom in. There are so many pixels, literally millions of pixels, (maybe 48 megapixels!) that every so often the tiny changes will be kind of in the form of Mickey Mouse or an airplane or something. With so many pixels, it just has to happen-- like rolling snake eyes with a pair of dice 5 times in a row. You never ever see that, because you're not rolling 50 million times! Here, every picture has 50 million shots.

Notice that the places that you've pointed out are all in areas of slight gradations of brightness-- the sky, clouds, shadows-- all just what would be expected.

Does that help?

IdrisSeabright:

Thanks-- I thought it was cool that the probability of rolling snake eyes with a pair of dice 5 times in a row is about 1 in 50 million, and that's about the same as the number of pixels in my camera. So I guess I should see Mickey Mouse pretty often!

Probability is such a weird thing. And our brains don't deal with it well. It's like randomness. Do you remember when people used to complain about the shuffle algorithm on iPods? How they would hear two songs by the same artist in a row and that "wasn't random?"

A drive-by poster complained about the same thing:

Zoomed photos are still showing cartoon c… - Apple Community

Pareidolia is a great word.

Thank you. I always have to look up the spelling. It made that thread very easy to find. 8^)

I am not sure what I am supposed to be seeing in the image, but it looks like a reflection from behind shadowed by the bottle in the foreground.

Even Photos' face recognition thought that this was a face!

Really-- it's just grass.

The moral of the story is that, if you look really hard for faces, you will see faces. Even if you're a computer…

I see absolutely nothing concerning there. This is almost certainly a case of your brain seeing patterns where there are none. It's just the normal way our brains work.

That's a much better explanation!

You sure about the 50 million? I think it is (1/12) ^5 or 1/248832.

1/36^5

Probability of both dice rolling 1s is 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/36