Whenever you take a picture of a computer screen, the screen looks distorted, but when you zoom in closer on the picture, it focuses a lot more
In: Technology
What you are seeing is a moire pattern.
When you take a photo of a screen with a digital camera, you are taking a pattern made up of millions of tiny squares (pixels), and recording it on a sensor as an image made of millions of tiny squares.
If you managed to align everything absolutely perfectly, you could record each pixel of the screen 1:1 to a pixel on your camera and it would look perfect.
Zoom out or zoom in a bit however and your pixels don’t necessarily line up right, and each pixel ends up recording a pixel and a bit of the screen or similar. This is the effect you are seeing where you get odd colour banding – the pixels are aligning in such a way that certain pixels become more prominent than others.
This gets even worse when you then view your picture on a monitor, as you have a rectangular pattern, being recorded by another not-quite-aligned rectangular pattern, and being displayed on a third not-quite-rectangular pattern.
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