
Camera made from 32k drinking straws takes pointillistic photographs - cdvonstinkpot
http://www.designboom.com/art/farrell-haynes-straw-camera-02-14-2017/
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theoh
The article repeats the standard erroneous concept of "single point
perspective", which it says is what a pinhole camera produces.

"instead of producing an image from a single point perspective, as would a
pinhole, its straw counterpart produces a multipoint perspective from an
array."

The traditional meaning of single point perspective is a drawing technique
which uses a single vanishing point (rather than multiple vanishing points,
one for each set of parallel lines in space).

The technique of using straws will produce a parallel projection of some kind,
depending on the design of the camera. It isn't a "multipoint perspective"
just because it's a parallel projection. This is so basic.

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jacquesm
Better link:

[http://strawcamera.com/cliff](http://strawcamera.com/cliff)

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ChuckMcM
Definitely the preferred link. I was trying to figure out if they were
exposing film or not. One could imagine that you could build a photo
transistor circuit into the end of every straw and make a digital camera
version.

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jacquesm
I realized it wasn't an article by anybody associated with or knowledgeable
about the project when I saw the 22mm diameter straws mentioned when clearly
they were much smaller than that.

How about a scanning version? Couple two mirrors to speakers and hook up a
photodiode to catch the reflected light. Though this is nicer in that it's all
extremely simple materials and no 'high tech' involved. There's a certain
charm in that.

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ChuckMcM
I'm having a hard time visualizing how that would work. I presume this uses
the long tubes as a way of isolating light from off axis "mixing" into the end
result otherwise you would simply have 32K versions of the image.

If you could uncover each straw individually then you could collect the light
from that straw using a parabolic collector behind the 'exposer'. Using two
sheets movable in the XY plane, one with a slot vertically and one with a slot
horizontally you scan across the tubes individually. Those sheets would have
to be nearly twice as wide and tall as the camera to allow full coverage
though.

Of course if you were going that route you could just attach a single straw to
the XY movers and have it scan the scene.

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jacquesm
> Of course if you were going that route you could just attach a single straw
> to the XY movers and have it scan the scene.

That was what I was visualizing, the first mirror would have the straw
attached. Making it rigid is quite a challenge.

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xioxox
Interesting. This is similar to how some X-ray and gamma ray detectors did
work or work in astronomy. Because you can't focus with lenses, you use narrow
tubes (collimators) to only gather the light from a certain region of the sky.
Note that most x-ray telescopes use focusing Wolter optics nowadays,
consisting of nested shells of reflective material. Collimating optics are
also used to detect particles, I believe.

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dreamcompiler
This is the way fiber optic lenses used to work: Take a bundle of a few
thousand optical fibers and you have a flexible "lens" that can see around
corners or into small holes. They're not used much any more because it's
difficult to keep the bundle coherent on both ends, and tiny high-res TV
cameras are dirt cheap now.

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averagewall
It'd be great to see some photos with more depth. Not having perspective is
going to make ordinary rectangular objects like walls and streets look weird.
This would be like a zoom lens, except presumably all the pixels merge to a
blur with greater distance.

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anotheryou
mechanical version (single, moving straw):
[https://youtu.be/R4vjfVWVHGY?t=86](https://youtu.be/R4vjfVWVHGY?t=86)

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vanderZwan
I was wondering if someone would post that work by Theo Jansen!

The fun bit about these camera's is that if you make the straws tubes long
enough, they have practically no perspective. With Jansen's paint machine,
which is also 1:1 in scale, this once resulted in a group photoraph being
photobombed by someone standing many, many meters behind the group but
appearing on the photograph as if he's right next to everyone else.

