Take Distorted and Psychedelic iPhone Photos:
The iPhone has no physical shutter and instead uses photon gating on its CMOS sensor. Some parts of the image are recorded before others, much like with a scanner. The iPhone’s CMOS scanner seems to be a lot slower than, say, the CMOS sensor on your Canon point and shoot camera. Therefore, as the camera is recording the image, any changes over that small but significant amount of time are recorded. Examples of this effect from photography days of yore (caused by old focal-plane shutters that were very slow) are the famous Lartigue photo of the leaning race car. It’s also known in a related form as slit-scan photography.What this means in iPhone terms is that if the subject or camera is moving — and if the ambient light is bright enough to allow for a fast shutter speed — the subject doesn’t blur, but rather distorts. Usually the result is pretty unpredictable, but with some practice one can see how certain effects can be created.
(Hat tip to Mike.)