A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

It seems like it would be simple enough to convert a video into an image like these by isolating a single column of pixels from each frame and putting them together chronologically.

You don't need an $85,000 camera to play around with slit scan photography. As with just about everything these days, there's an app for that: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slit-scan-camera/id419292360...

Note that this is slit-SCAN, which is a bit different in that it moves the "slit" across the face off the sensor, rather than capturing from a static slit over time (the same technique was used in Star Trek:TNG to show the Enterprise going into warp). Nonetheless, you can play with time similarly.

It seems excessive to invent a new type of cameras just to take pictures of taichi masters.

j/k

I built a camera like that out of wood a couple years ago. It uses gears on the inside to pull a regular roll of film through and expose it through a narrow vertical slit as you rotate the whole camera on its center axis. It's sort of a broad-stroke photo. http://nnife.com/d/?dimension=33

Here are a few shots that turned out decently: http://nnife.com/p/?dimension=20 These are just film scans. You can by the light bars see on the photos that it was very hard to rotate the camera at a constant rate.

You can also see that as I went with/against the traffic, cars were elongated or shortened. Really interesting phenomenon. I was working on this with a painting teacher at the school I go to, whose fascination with unconventional forms of photography got me interested as well. Unfortunately I was a woodworking noob when I made it so its success rate was too low for me to keep using it and I never took many more photos than that.

If I ever get around to building a better version I want to try an idea he had: mount the camera in a spot and expose it over the same piece of film at three different times of day using red, green, and blue filters. That would add another level to emphasizing time in a photograph.

The teacher I was working with is named Nicholas Evans-Cato. The experiment started off as just one to make a film panoramic camera. You can see why he'd be interested in that if you look at his work. http://www.georgebillis.com/artists/nicholas_evansCato.html

I'm sure it's been done before, but it was a really fun experiment. Changed the way I think a little bit.

Looking at those photos, I wonder if a "time algorithm" could reconstruct them into a "normal" photo?