Addendum: See also the Nodding Faceless Statue below.

Experimenting with Google Photos, our friend Father Pitt discovered that Google will automatically do certain things with your pictures, especially if you have a lot of similar pictures. Father Pitt always takes several of the same shot, just to make sure he gets one usable photograph in the bunch. The secret to being a good photographer is to take hundreds of pictures and expect to use a dozen or so of them. (And Father Pitt never throws out the failures, because—who knows?—they might be useful for something.)

Sometimes Google decides that what you wanted was an HDR version of the image. HDR—“high dynamic range”—images use more than one photograph of the same thing to capture detail both in the shadows and highlights; in sunlight, for example, one might otherwise have to settle for either featureless white highlights or featureless black shadows.

But often Google decides that, since the pictures are only subtly different, what you wanted was an animation. So it dutifully animates your multiple shots of the same stationary object. The result is usually just a jiggly picture; but every once in a while, Google’s automatic animations come out, well, terrifying. And you may see an example of the latter only if you promise not to hold Dr. Boli responsible for your psychiatrist’s bills:

And here, for your further disturbance, is the Nodding Faceless Statue: