Quote:
Originally Posted by serio562
No person in their right mind will have a cell phone in 2012 with the capability to take this crappy ass photo.
Depends on the location. I've never been in Ellis Island, but based on photos I've found of the place, it's pretty dark inside. Even a decent DSLR could produce such an image if not handled well so a phone in the hands of a nearby fan certainly could.
The newest iPad and iPhone cameras have a fixed aperture of f/2.4. Other smartphones and devices seem to vary by a half-stop either way, but they all seem to run in that range (which is why you can take pretty well-lit photos indoors). With a constant aperture with no manual override settings, a smartphone's camera will adjust the shutter speed and sensor sensitivity (known as ISO in the film days) according to the scene.
In a dark environment like Ellis Island's dining room, the camera will slow its shutter speed until the subject is properly lit. This makes the image highly prone to blur: both due to the subject's movement or to camera shake. In this case, the softness is due to shake, which is why both the human and inanimate objects blur almost equally. You can tell by the ghosting around the little white specials card and the white bottle cap that the camera probably moved at an angle from lower left to upper right.
Additionally, a phone's camera (or a DSLR set on an automatic setting) will also adjust the sensitivity, maybe to as high as ISO 1600. If the camera's sensor isn't high quality -- which a phone's camera is not -- the image will display a lot of noise. All of that grain, speckles and blotches are enlarged if the user closed in with a digital zoom.
Finally, this photo was pulled off a friend's Facebook page. Not pretending to be a high-end photo-hosting service, Facebook further compresses images when uploading (presumably to save space), which results in additional artifacting.
All this said, this photo DOES look pretty bad. As dark as Ellis Island seems to be, this table was somewhat near one of the light fixtures: it's clearly above and very slightly behind "Tom." There is a visible highlight on top of his head, while the red cup in front of "Howard" casts a shadow that runs out a few inches. Draw a straight line from the edge of the shadow to the lip of that cup, then do the same with the ketchup bottle, and you can figure out very quickly where the light was. It shouldn't be so dark that a person can't get a better image.
My guess is that the guy shooting was trying to be quick and discreet, which means he wasn't too caught up in getting a tack-sharp image. Thus, we see what looks like security camera footage.