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A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

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Re: A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

#21

Post by lurker14 »

I was looking for this recently! There is a photo, either form this artist or someone else, that was taken at some sort of festival, a photo of all the people walking by.

It was featured in some website that made the rounds on reddit or slashdot or somewhere.

You can get the same effect with a flatbed scanner, which operates on the same principles but assumes a fixed subject, so the camera moves while scanning. I can't find a link now, but there is a fad of rolling your face on a scanner and sharing the result on a website.

Also, this is basically how a CMOS camera works, which is why you get a distortion effect (not jsut blur) when photographinc moving objects: https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+cmos+distortion

Re: A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

#23

Post by keenerd »

numlocked wrote: post #4

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…

If you want to play with real hardware, scrap a $100 scanner.

Simplest/oldest: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html (The garage door picture continues to be awesome after so many years.)

More professional version: http://golembewski.awardspace.com/index.html (And weirdest - you really do not want to blink during one of these photos.)

Re: A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

#24

Post by aw3c2 »

dbaupp wrote: post #19
aw3c2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that was fun: #starting at 467s and outputting the images of the next 3 seconds ffmpeg -ss 467 -t 3 -i video.mkv output.%04d.png # crop image to 1px slices 280 pixels from the left. gm mogrify -crop 1x+280+0 *.png # stitch them gm montage -border 0 -geometry +0+0 -tile x1 *.png image.jpg Perfect example how easy and straightforward it is to use command line utilities. Now someone just has to find movies with st…

Nice! That's much neater than I thought it would be. P.S. you can use "output.%03d.png" to zero pad the output to 011 (and %04d for 0011 etc.)

Yeah, just noticed that myself. Thanks. :)

Re: A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

#25

Post by bazzargh »

mdonahoe wrote: post #11
bazzargh wrote: post #3

Slit scan photography has been used artistically before: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/25/belden-adams.php (the picture of the runner and the cyclist is nicely mindbending) And pretty much everyone here would be familiar with a couple of artistic uses of slit-scan photography - the opening credits of Doctor Who ( http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A907544 ) and the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Is it possible the author hasn't seen a photo finish before? I was surprised he didn't mention races at all.

I thought that as well. I can't imagine anyone who reads athletics/cycling reports wouldn't have recognized those for what they were. He's not far wrong in the article, to be fair - just in suggesting that the artist invented the technique. But that suggests he did no research beyond a misleading gallery press release, since just googling the term brings up lots of interesting stuff.

I don't mean to denigrate the art though, because the pics are still striking and interesting.

Re: A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

#27

Post by seany »

This technique was used in a slightly different way on NRO satellites. I think KH-7 was the first (GAMBIT http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1279/1 ). They would get the film moving at the same speed as the ground that they were covering. The constant momentum of the film moving was easier to counteract than the constant back and forth motion of a big shutter if they were capturing film "plates".

Re: A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

#28

Post by bcks »

numlocked wrote: post #4

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…

It's worth noting the the Slit-Scan Camera iPhone app is FREE: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slit-scan-camera/id419292360

Re: A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

#29

Post by mdda »

aw3c2 wrote: post #13
amaxwell wrote: post #2

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.

Yeah, that was fun: #starting at 467s and outputting the images of the next 3 seconds ffmpeg -ss 467 -t 3 -i video.mkv output.%04d.png # crop image to 1px slices 280 pixels from the left. gm mogrify -crop 1x+280+0 *.png # stitch them gm montage -border 0 -geometry +0+0 -tile x1 *.png image.jpg Perfect example how easy and straightforward it is to use command line utilities. Now someone just has to find movies with st…

Corollory : One could produce a whole range of image0%d.png from vertical slices through the video, and stitch them together into a movie. Essentially rotating the movie abouts its y axis (in the x-t plane).

If we assume 50fps, then every 1000px wide video would become a 3-4 minute short. But movies would require a very wide screen...

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