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A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

402 points| spathak | 13 years ago |slate.com | reply

58 comments

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[+] artursapek|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] wrl|13 years ago|reply
Oh man, those "few shots" are beautiful. Do you have them in a higher resolution?
[+] numlocked|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] chmod775|13 years ago|reply
You can just make a video, and select a column of pixels. Then place the different columns (color-wise) you get from each frame next to each other. The resulting image will have the same width as the number of frames you used and it will probably have a lot of artefacts considering the quality of today's (home) video technology. But it is essentially the same.

Just what came to my mind just now.

[+] bazzargh|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] mdonahoe|13 years ago|reply
Is it possible the author hasn't seen a photo finish before? I was surprised he didn't mention races at all.
[+] sbirchall|13 years ago|reply
I was also reminded of that weird final scene in the Animatrix short about the runner when he has some kind of warp spasm before transcending and waking from the Matrix. That just gave me a renewed appreciation of animation.
[+] amaxwell|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] aw3c2|13 years ago|reply
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 static camera scenes that have a lot of horizontal actor/object movement.

Random example showing Bill Bailey as a demon: http://i.imgur.com/AWWG8.jpg

Some static rallye car cameras from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2QMuT04EOw -> http://i.imgur.com/GV3bY.jpg

Needs either higher framerate videos or longer scenes.

[+] jib|13 years ago|reply
This is how goal line cameras work - there's one at every race course and sporting event around the world. I had a weekend job running one at a race course growing up.

Nowadays they are digital I guess, but the technology is the same - you record only a sliver (the goal line) - the analog version has the film running past the sliver on spools, with the speed being adjustable based on how fast objects you want to record.

[+] mikecane|13 years ago|reply
Looking at those photos, I wonder if a "time algorithm" could reconstruct them into a "normal" photo?
[+] Semiapies|13 years ago|reply
Probably not, as the slit is kept looking at one plane. You could turn it into a video one pixel wide, though.
[+] hmc|13 years ago|reply
You would need multiple slits to be recorded at the same time, but that would just be separating a still frame from a video stream.
[+] recursive|13 years ago|reply
This is how finish line cameras at races normally work. At least many of the bike races I've been in.
[+] falcolas|13 years ago|reply
Horse as well. Throw in a well positioned tall but narrow mirror on the opposite side of the track, and you get a full view of how the race finished in a single photograph.
[+] bo1024|13 years ago|reply
Yes, all professional track meets (e.g. the Olympics) use these cameras to officially determine order of finish.
[+] msisk6|13 years ago|reply
Ward Cunningham and I built something similar with an old Mac mini and an external firewire iSight camera when we both worked at AboutUs a few years back. We pointed it at the train tracks behind the office and got some cool images of trains as they passed by. I don't think we saved any of the images, though -- it was just a quick after-hour hack project.

On a related note, the new Panorama function in iOS 6 seems to turn the iPhone's camera into a slit scanner using the phone's accelerometer for the rotation rate to stitch together a pretty good panorama on the fly.

[+] danboarder|13 years ago|reply
A similar volumetric slitscanning technique can be done using XBOX Kinect using 3D data points, here is a video result from an experimenter:

http://vimeo.com/51383370

"...this technique uses spatial + temporal data stored in a 4D Space-Time Continuum, and 3 dimensional temporal gradients (i.e. not just slitscanning on the depth/rgb images, but surface-scanning on the animated 3D point cloud)."

[+] crucialfelix|13 years ago|reply
Here's the first place I saw this in video form: http://www.mutek.org/en/tv/191-biosphere-genkai-1

CINECHAMBER CHANNEL BIOSPHERE - GENKAI-1 Official video by Egbert Mittelstädt From the album N-Plants

It's performed in the cinechamber which is four huge video walls with I think an eight speaker array. The time distortion is amazing and you are totally immersed.

[+] bsmith|13 years ago|reply
Does this remind anyone else of the Tralfamadorians analogy from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five? I can't find the relevant quote...
[+] randlet|13 years ago|reply
Yes. It's probably been 15 years since I read the book but that was still my first thought as soon as I read the headline.
[+] mcmire|13 years ago|reply
This reminds me of something I saw a while back (it might have been on Boing Boing or something, and I'm sure it made its way across the web) of a guy who had a camera he'd made out of an old scanner. Basically, the scanner would move across the surface very slowly so it captured a slice of time. I wonder if that sort of technique is being used here.
[+] praptak|13 years ago|reply
Look up "The Fourth Dimension" movie by Zbigniew Rybczynski - at first sight it is hard to believe it was made in 1988 because it looks like a product of some heavy digital 3D processing. In fact it is each of the 625 horizontal scan lines shifted a bit in time relative to the previous one, an idea very similar to the one described in the article.
[+] mbrameld|13 years ago|reply
I did something similar once with a flatbed scanner. Put my hand/face/whatever on the bed and moved it parallel to the scan head. Made for really long creepy fingers or a smushed up face.