Numpy.array creates column major matrix from an image

Question

I am trying to open an image which has 960 (width) x 640 (height) pixels as a matrix in python.

For some reason, after running the following lines:

originalImage = Image.open('fat_zack.jpg')
originalImageMatrix = numpy.asarray(originalImage)

originalImageMatrix is of size (640, 960, 3) and I have to access its elements by providing column coordinate prior to row coordinate

If I try to do something like: originalImageMatrix[959][1][1] I get the following error:

IndexError: index 959 is out of bounds for axis 0 with size 640

Do you've any idea what am I missing?

Answer 1

Fixed it with Matt Pitkin's solution -> originalImageMatrix.swapaxes(0, 1)

What causes this problem is still unknown to me, though.