“Perfectly Timed Photos”: 50 Times People Snapped Photographs Just At The Right Moment

As humans, we're very visual creatures. We process visual information way quicker and more eagerly than when we have to, say, read it. This is not news for advertisers and entertainment creators who incorporate visuals into their content. What's the best proof of that? Just think of the days in school when you had to listen to a classmate's presentation with a bunch of text in the slides. Weren't the fun presentations those that included some visual aids?

There's an oft-cited statistic that the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than written text. While experts doubt the validity of this claim, researchers from MIT, however, have claimed that our brains can identify what we're seeing in an image in as little as 13 milliseconds.

These kinds of photos also just radiate authenticity. You can hardly throw a beagle in the air and hope that it lines up perfectly with the shot above a person's head in the back. That's another reason why we find them so interesting and satisfying to look at.

In the age where viral moments are curated and brand accounts have taken over comment sections, people crave seeing authentic moments like these even more. Marketing tricks like the Duolingo owl being obsessed with Dua Lipa work for a while, but soon lose their charm, especially when everyone starts doing something similar.

A memorable image doesn't have to be exclusively funny or enraging. Recent research has found that posts containing memorable images will go viral no matter their emotional weight. Experts say that people engage with social media posts when they make them feel something: anger, happiness, laughter, or rage.

"Unlike emotional valence or moral framing which are more context-dependent, memorability reflects image features that tend to influence memory performance similarly across individuals, across cultures, age groups, tasks, and environments," the researchers concluded.

The perfectly timed photos phenomenon is not so much about photography as it is about meme culture. According to Know Your Meme, the first instance of the term "perfectly timed photo" on the internet was on the CollegeHumor website. This genre of photos quickly gained popularity in other online forums, as digital cameras became readily available and, later, even now-vintage camera phones.

Perfectly timed photos are really popular in sports journalism. Granted, where there's movement, slow motion and accidental photographs often capture moments with human bodies and faces contorted in all sorts of funny positions. Some perfectly timed photos of athletes are the opposite of funny and goofy. Belgian photographer Eric T'Kindt won a 2024 World Sports Photography Award in 2024 when he captured Japanese gymnast Daiki Hashimoto mid-air.