But when the grandmother inspected the photos afterwards, she was left feeling extremely ‘freaked out’.
Grandmother ‘freaked out’ over photos of grandson
The boy’s mom decided to take to Reddit to share the photo, to see if anyone would be able to shed any light on what could possibly have made it so disturbing.
“My mom took my two year old son to the store on Thursday and walked into the mirror aisle,” she wrote on the Optical Illusion subreddit.
“As she walked with him, my son was playfully messing with his water cup so she decided to take multiple photos of him in the mirror.”
The child’s mom continued: “As it was with an iPhone, 2 of the 3 photos were ‘live’ photos and show my son thrashing the cup around and speaking gibberish.”
However, this is where things get complicated.
“One of the photos was not live and when my mom reviewed it, she noticed my son’s reflection did not match his exact pose and cup positioning in reality,” the post added.
“Is this just a glitch in timing of the photo or am I making this out to be more than it is? She is freaked out about it.”
If you look closely, it’s easy to see what the mom is talking about, as in the reflection, the little boy is clearly holding his blue water cup up to his mouth to drink.
However, in the side of the image, you can see the boy is holding the beaker well away from his face.
Social media users suggest sinister explanation
After the mom shared the photo on Reddit, many users started coming up with their own explanation as to what could be causing the two separate views.
While one person simply wrote: “He is a wizard,” another had a slightly more spooky suggestion, writing: “I think you got a glimpse of a parallel dimension by chance, with the setup of mirrors facing each other.”
A third joked: “It’s just that the boy in the mirror is thirstier than your son.”
“Oh dang, that freaked me out a bit,” another wrote, while someone else said: “That’s trippy!”
The logical explanation
Fortunately, several Reddit users clearly know their stuff when it comes to photography and technology and were able to offer a perfectly reasonable (though much less fun) explanation.
“Yeah when you take a picture on iOS like that, it doesn’t take just one picture, it takes several frames from before and after you hit the shutter button, splits those into subframes like foreground, subject, and background then automatically merges them together into the final franken-image which combines the best parts of each frame,” one person explained.
“So probably something like he moved the cup very fast as the photo was taken so the clearest image for the mirror area without cup movement motion blur was before it began moving and was on his mouth while the clearest foreground subframe of the actual kid was after the movement, the image processing doesn’t realize that’s a mirror image of the kid in the foreground and should match up with him it just looks for quality.”
However, they did add: “Or you captured an image of his djinn companion.”
Meanwhile, another added: “
Fun fact one of the planned fixes with Apple intelligence was to detect when there’s a mirror to prevent exactly this.”