Electronic speckle photography is an accurate, easy-to-use, video-based technique for the analysis of two- and three-dimensional deformation fields and in-plane strain fields, based on numerical cross correlation. Through the use of statistical optics, simulated speckle patterns, and experiments the accuracy in electronic speckle photography was found to depend on correlation, speckle size, window size, and correlation filter. The estimated correlation was found to be the combined effect of three mutually competing factors because of classical speckle correlation, subimage overlap, and displacement gradients. In many applications white-light speckle patterns provide a more accurate estimate of the displacement field than do laser speckle patterns.