Homemade Digital Cameras 230
Michael Golembewski writes "For the past three years, I've been taking apart cheap secondhand flatbed scanners and turning them into homemade large format digital cameras. They are well over 100 mexapixel in resolution, and produce results that are both similar to and significantly different from traditional digital and conventional cameras."
Re:why not just post-process? (Score:3, Informative)
For the scanning effects, you take a video or continuous shooting (most digital cameras support both) and simulate the scanning by taking scanlines sequentially from successive frames.
Re:why not just post-process? (Score:2, Informative)
It's a different effect and it's captured through optics and time, it can not be replicated perfectly in a computer and photoshop is not the solution to all problems artistic. This is a very creative idea and I plan on personally converting my 4x6 scanner to take picture like this. It's an original idea, I'd be interested to see if color filters on the lens would allow you to take multiple exposures for red/green/blue and mix them in the computer to create a color image. I think it could make some very interesting pieces of art.
Re:Amazing tech skills with art value! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Here's another idea. (Score:2, Informative)
Time-lapse photo finishes (Score:5, Informative)
See here - http://www.sportingworld.co.uk/newyearsprint/pics
The best ones are when somebody puts their feet on the finishing line, and it gets stretched out to several "metres" long.
Argh! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:why not just post-process? (Score:3, Informative)
But it is the same way existing digital line cameras work, and it's the same way film-based line cameras work, yielding, not surprisingly, the same effects.
It's an original idea,
No, it's not. Even the consumer-scanner-as-large-format-camera is old.
I'd be interested to see if color filters on the lens would allow you to take multiple exposures for red/green/blue and mix them in the computer to create a color image. I think it could make some very interesting pieces of art.
You mean like Technicolor? Or like Autochrome? Or like three-CCD analog camcorders, digital cameras, and digital camcorders?
Re:Brave guy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why not just post-process? (Score:2, Informative)
You can buy a high-resolution scanning digital camera off the shelf, which gives you exactly the same distortions but actually produces excellent still images. You can buy a used Horizon camera and get the same effect on film, minus the banding, stuttering, and poor focus. You can look on the web for "slit-scan photography" (used, among other things, in the film "2001"). You can do this sort of thing with any old large format camera. Or you might look around the web for the same hack done in the mid-1990's, multiple times.
Finally, I really, really, really don't understand why these types of comments are made. It's so infuriating - do you have any sense of exploration and experimentation? Or understand the desire to tell others about your experiences?
No, what's infuriating is when people do the same "hack" over and over again. At some point, it ceases to be a hack and just is a pathetic display of inexperience.
Re:Recycling in a Good Way (Score:3, Informative)
Several of what? An old scanner is pretty useless without a decent lens with large area coverage, and a housing to mount it in. That's not exactly cheap. If you have old large format cameras or lenses just lying around, then getting a scanner is the least of your problems.
I don't know about you, but I have Horseman 4x5 cameras coming out of my ass.
Re:why not just post-process? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't. I have a chip on my shoulder about people claiming something as artistically and/or technically new when it has been done numerous times before, and often better.
Here [sentex.net] is one link. Here's [rit.edu] another one. There have been a number of other variations, including leaving the scanner in the film plane of a LF camera.
Re:Argh! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:115 Megapixels? (Score:3, Informative)
Similar tinkering (Score:5, Informative)
Rochester Institute of Technology years ago. His site is interesting
http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/ [rit.edu]
Many have done the same later on. I got through a Christmas period converting a Umax page scanner to a panorama scanner. It was fun.
http://www.pigment-print.com/Panorama%20Camera%20
Re:Amazing tech skills with art value! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why not just post-process? (Score:3, Informative)
For anyone that's interested, there's a reasonably good page describing the technique here [rit.edu] and pages about it's application in the stargate sequence of 2001 here [seriss.com] and here [underview.com].
It's possible to fake the technique in Adobe aftereffects with the time displacement filter too.
Coral Cache (just in case) (Score:2, Informative)
With that many pictures I would have used the coral cache link in the summary.
Re:115 Megapixels? (Score:5, Informative)
So in this configuration the raw file would hold 16Mb more or less. If this file is compressed with a non-lossy (gzip, zip, bz) compression it can be expected at least a 2x compression rate, so it would re-shrink it to 8Mb.
So I guess that it is not that obvious that a 8Megapixel camera will have a 8Mbyte raw file, even if it seem obvious.
Re:Dupe, happended 7 years ago (Score:3, Informative)
a lens. In the newer article, the scanner was used as is, but with the lamp
removed. I like the latter approach better. So this isn't a dupe,
but a new improved method.
Re:115 Megapixels? (Score:3, Informative)
Mirroring Help!!! (SITE'S BACK UP) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Time-lapse photo finishes (Score:2, Informative)
The image you are seeing is best thought of as a graph, not a photograph. The camera/system is recording the image/pixels from a very thin line (maybe 2 pixels) across the track at high speed. Think of the output as a graph where time increases to the right. The red line you see in the image is used in determining the times. It is used like a cursor. Start (time 0) is at the left edge and as you move the cursor right you can read the x value (the time of that particular set of pixels. The Y axis is the pixels across the track, with the bottom being at the camera, the top across the track.
The camera is set up on the center of the finish line. That is why the lanes appear white, because at that point on the track, the lanes are white and the dividers are black.
Gaffer's Tape = Duct Tape (Score:3, Informative)
SoupIsGood Food
You can distort with a 35mmSLR too (Score:3, Informative)
Essentially the shutter mechanism is acting like a mechanical line-scan.