I love this photo (thanks to Carlos Mario del Rio for posting it)!

There’s something about tiled floors (and tiles in general) that has always mesmerized me and this is a really good one. I like the unusual perspective too.

There’s a radial pattern and a circular pattern of tiles, but if I stare at the photo I also see hints of an interference pattern, an intriguing flower pattern. I think this is a genuine Moiré pattern, one quite well known to photographers, generated by interference between circles of varying distance with the camera’s sensor pixel grid.

In my next post I will look in more detail at Moiré patterns and try to explain how they form.

I will show how the effect can be removed, or at least reduced, particularly from scanned images. Similar techniques can be used to remove acquisition footprint from reflection seismic data, which will be the topic of an upcoming series on MyCarta.