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ReFrame – The EPaper Camera

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Re: ReFrame – The EPaper Camera

#21

Post by dofm »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I don't fully understand the obsession with making less-capable devices and talking about them as though being less capable is a feature by itself.

You don’t deserve the downvotes for what is a wholly reasonable and not unusual question.

Art really demands constraints, simplicity is clarifying, ephemerality is provocative, and designing your own creative tools invites metacognition. Doing all of this with a highly capable computing device is fascinating, IMO: it’s hypothetical, alternative future stuff. This device is an art experiment, isn’t it?

I have a (still modestly expensive) full frame digital camera that I bought specifically for the purpose of using alternative lens techniques: a home-made tilt shift bellows, wide angle pinhole, vintage lenses, enlarger lenses, and my own simple adaptations of binocular eyepieces and simple achromats, which have an “early photography” vibe, not least because to design them I ended up reading about Daguerre, Chevalier and Wollaston. They have changed my perspective on photography.

There is IMO very little in the way of artistic inspiration to be found at the cutting edge unless you are going to at least partly subvert cutting edge tools to do things they weren’t designed for. So it follows that creative technology is likely to be something of a dialogue with transformation and limitation.

Re: ReFrame – The EPaper Camera

#22

Post by flashman »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I don't fully understand the obsession with making less-capable devices and talking about them as though being less capable is a feature by itself.

When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone.

His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worrying so much about fidelity probably gave him more time to concentrate on the lyrics and music.

Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?

Re: ReFrame – The EPaper Camera

#23

Post by Rygian »

num42 wrote: post #16

Great work! About two hours ago, I was listening to "Générique" by Miles Davis (jazz) with a noisy, animated gradient background. The whole experience felt incredibly immersive. Now, this camera can bring that beautiful noise texture into photos with a single click. Add some clever motion graphics and transform those photos into illustrative noisy textured gradients, it could become an amazing music visualizer for ja…

As a curiosity, "Générique" is not a name for a song. "Générique" is the word used in French for the music that plays over the intro opening credits of a movie or TV show episode.

In this case, this would be the song that plays over the intro credits of "Ascenseur Pour l'Echaffaud" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051378/).

(Ie. Miles Davis might have several pieces of music all titled 'générique', for the various movies or shows where he contributed on soundtracks)

Re: ReFrame – The EPaper Camera

#28

Post by ectoloph »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Its a great idea, I think they should read the papers on dithering (I've got a color e-paper display and you can get a lot less noise than that by better dithering). The interesting thing is that back in the film days you took your 12 pictures and sent them off to the lab, and two or three days later you found out if any of them were great. This gives some of that "wait for it" kind of feel back to the photography. A…

I really enjoyed playing with dithering to get good results from the eink spectra displays with 6 or 7 colours.

They end up making good photo frames, especially for older digital photos.

Re: ReFrame – The EPaper Camera

#29

Post by dofm »

flashman wrote: post #22
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I don't fully understand the obsession with making less-capable devices and talking about them as though being less capable is a feature by itself.

When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone. His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worryi…

> Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?

Figuring out how to use a phone camera in creative practice is really an interesting challenge.

Photographers still don't even pay attention to their ancillary uses, to be honest; you can use them to collect materials and build photography plans. But they can also teach you a lot of stuff (particularly subject isolation and wide angle visualisation)

Re: ReFrame – The EPaper Camera

#30

Post by ssl-3 »

fcnprvfgurcynpr wrote: post #11

cute. I'd like to see some photos without the dithering applied, as it looks similar to a regular dithered jpeg, like you'd see on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ it would be fun to try out a few different algos for the colour space conversion.

It's kind of fun to note that those are dithered PNGs, not JPEGs.

That's good for this use as the lossy compression of JPEG is specifically geared towards working with smooth gradients of 24-bit photographs, and that kind of smoothness is a quality that dithered images just don't have.

PNG's compression loves finding same-color fields and [losslessly] compressing them so it does this business just fine.

Anyway, the website is nice and I like the style.

It reminds me a lot of early JPEG days in the BBS world, wherein: Flame wars.

Those who only had VGA displays (or less) strongly preferred GIFs because they tended to look "right" when displayed with their predefined 256 color palette, whereas a combination of JPEGs and bad dithering by lazy display software took longer to load and looked far worse on the same systems. They were very loud with this preference.

Meanwhile, everyone with a truecolor display was quite certain that these GIF-loving folks were insane for their fondness of storage- and bandwidth-wasting 8-bit GIFs. It was clearly evident that JPEG was superior in every way for photographs, and that it was here to stay, and that that those who were limited to VGA really needed to learn to shut the hell up and spend that effort on getting a real video card instead. ;)

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