
A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space - spathak
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2012/10/15/jay_mark_johnson_s_very_unusual_camera_emphasizes_time_over_space.html
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artursapek
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.

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wrl
Oh man, those "few shots" are beautiful. Do you have them in a higher
resolution?

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numlocked
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...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slit-scan-
camera/id419292360?mt=8)

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.

~~~
keenerd
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.)

~~~
minikomi
There's also the (admittedly more expensive) wonderful Widelux camera and its
various Russian knockoff models. Jeff Bridges uses it to wonderful effect to
document on-scenes at most of his movies, and then present the staff with a
book when shooting closes. <http://www.jeffbridges.com/camera.html>

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

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bazzargh
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.

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amaxwell
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.

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aw3c2
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.

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mdda
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...

~~~
emillon
I tried that with a Super Metroid run (hoping that the results would be easier
to see with a video game):

<http://i.imgur.com/8TOPA.gif>

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jib
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.

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

~~~
Semiapies
Probably not, as the slit is kept looking at one plane. You could turn it into
a video one pixel wide, though.

~~~
esrauch
It might be interesting to see a video where each frame is one photo of this,
and over time it goes through the different X-positions. Effectively swapping
the horizontal and time axis in a video.

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recursive
This is how finish line cameras at races normally work. At least many of the
bike races I've been in.

~~~
latchkey
Here's a rather interesting article (from 2004) on how the Tour is managed...
[http://www.engadget.com/2004/07/19/counting-every-second-
a-b...](http://www.engadget.com/2004/07/19/counting-every-second-a-behind-the-
scenes-look-at-timing-and/)

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daniel_reetz
As many others have mentioned, this is a well-explored field. Golan Levin
maintains a very extensive list of slit-scan camera experiments, check it out
for some awesome examples:

<http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/>

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eternalban
This pic [1] always used to bug me. Finally makes sense.

[1]:
[http://www.flong.com/storage/images/texts/slit_scan/lartigue...](http://www.flong.com/storage/images/texts/slit_scan/lartigue_cartrip.jpg)

~~~
vaughanb
Ah, no that's something else: shutter distortion.

This was made on a large format camera -- probably something like 4 x 5 inches
-- with a focal plane shutter. The shutter has a huge distance to cover -- 4
inches -- and it takes a while for the slit to cross the whole film frame.

The camera panning on one direction caused the spectators in the background to
be distorted in one direction, while the car was moving faster than the camera
and is distorted in the other direction.

Its interesting to note that the distortion was mimicked in cartoons as a way
to show speed.

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soulwire
Hacked up a quick JavaScript implementation of this for anyone to play with:
<http://jsfiddle.net/soulwire/xKCt4/embedded/result/>

It uses Web RTC so you'll need a capable browser (such as Chrome) and will
have to allow webcam access when prompted!

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mathewsanders
Daniel Crooks is an Australian artist who does similar work, but with video as
well as still images. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUwud5r5Ug>

Some of his work is projected onto huge displays which is am amazing immersive
experience!

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msisk6
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.

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danboarder
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)."

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ColinWright
This is the kind of photo they use for getting a "photo-finish" shot - they
have the vertical spacial dimension, and time running sideways.

I have a similar idea for one of the representations of where I'll be
speaking:

<http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TalksInSpaceTime.html>

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crucialfelix
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.

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bsmith
Does this remind anyone else of the Tralfamadorians analogy from Kurt
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five? I can't find the relevant quote...

~~~
randlet
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.

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mcmire
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.

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praptak
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.

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eternalban
<http://www.jaymarkjohnson.com/videos/>

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mbrameld
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.

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yogsototh
It reminds me "One year in one image":

<http://eirikso.com/2011/01/04/one-year-in-one-image/>

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joering2
every time I see parts of human body like that, I have a flash backs from the
very first time when I saw Aphex Twin's Rubber Johny. Worth watching, IMHO :)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmH1vidnQ1g>

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logotype
kind of similar work of zbig rybczynski way way back (using analogue gear). on
a side-note, discussed this with sean of autechre on how to achieve the same
effect in maxmsp/jitter by delaying each horizontal line :)

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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".

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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>

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ktizo
Reminds me a lot of "Dancing on the Timeline", a slitscan version of a classic
scene from "Singing in the Rain"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmWljCI_4Ok>

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

j/k

