Slashdot Mirror
Camera Meets Speedometer, Travel Across Country Together
BluKnight writes "This guy hacked his camera to his speedometer, and ended up taking a picture EVERY MILE during a trip across the US. Kodak has the results (Flash in use!) of this venture. For my next hack, I'm going to interface to my digital camera to take a picture every time I blink -- I'll never miss what I'm seeing again!" The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls. Sad thing is, I understand this. (I still love film) The interactive map is -really- well done, but requires flash...
But that's an ODOMETER. Try again, okay?
Wouldn't it have been easier to hook the camera to his odometer, instead of the speedometer?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I kept re-reading the description wondering "why do I care how fast he was going at each mile?"
Boy, I just can't waitt to spend an hour clicking through 3,304 little blurry pictures.
I stole this Sig
I sent this link to my friends, oh, 2 years ago.
You don't have to stop every 36 miles. Cameras for animation use 35mm film and use stock rolls. Professional photographers have mega-film magazines for normal cameras so that you can shoot 100-200 shots without stopping.
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Flash camera out in the sunshine? :) Oh, *that* Flash.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Not nearly as exciting as a Polaroid in the bedroom.
I guess he didn't use Kodak Max(tm) for all his high speed action shots!
It's just Crap.
The gentleman in question is being sued by the owner of PetsWarhouse.com for driving in his time zone, and then posting a picture of his timezone on the internet.
This guy hacked his camera to his speedometer, and ended up taking a picture EVERY MILE during a trip across the US.
I eventually realized he meant odometer.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
It Works great on this site :-)
If you're going to be taking blurry pics, why use film? Save yourself the effort, and use a digital. Plus, you could do other cool things, like take a picture and* post it to your website every mile (okay, every 5 miles) you drive your car, period. I think that would be much more interesting than just taking a trip across country. Put together a little album of your travels when you sell the thing.
http://www.shonenjump.com The world's most popular manga, now in English!
Absolutely beautiful invention for travel diaries. Please do route 19 or route 9 in Virginia down past the Gorge and Toronto to Ottawa cross-country route via Kaladar, a town of 87 citizens, with nothing else but serene terrain for 30 miles around. Also the Toronto to Vancouver train journey in Winter if you can adapt this device to trains, with a 360 degree lens, perhaps placing it on the top of the train.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
going digital might have made the trip faster. 36miles each roll... thats a thousand rolls of film!
AF-Design, web development.
And we thought people talking on a cell phone were hazardous.... Doesn't Kodak make an extended roll for professionals, too? I'd think a 200 frame magazine would have been a lot handier, although a pain to change out compared to a standard roll.
What I wonder is why he didnt use one of the extended roll backs for his camera. Stopping every 36 miles to change film would really slow you down...
I mean even my wife doesnt have to stop that often...
Americans could not be more self absorbed if they were made of equal parts water and paper towel. -Dennis Miller
Even if you spent an evening just looking at skimming through these, you could get an idea.
It used to be that people often lived their whole lives within walking distance of their home village. You can easily have the equivalent of that today, with close knit communities of other types.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Wasn't there a (8mm?) Movie made of a similar trip? IIRC, it was from coast to coast, and you could watch the drive in superfast motion. It takes 15(+-) min to see the whole thing, and the scale speed was something like 600 mph. I seem to recall it was used in a Saturday Night Live sketch as well..
It seems like he went through some of the most boring, flattest parts of the US on his trip. Even through Colorado and Utah, everything was flat. What's up with that? I know the US is more interesting than that. Hell, Pennsylvania is more interesting than that. He should have started in Maine. :-)
They were beautiful, weren't they?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Either that guy took all the pictures in high quality 5 MP TIFF ... and carried at least 10 lbs of compactflash ... or the pictures suck and are super compressed
:)
either way that whole 'project' is a long ride
Ken Dale Email: Protection on
Check out Confluence, which is another cool project involving digital images and geographic locations. Their goal is to take a photo at every confluence point - an intersection of integer longitude and latitude points. Very fun, very cool.
This is a cool map, showing where they have photos, and is fully navigable.
Education is the silver bullet.
He should have brought a woman along and made her change the film.
I love seeing these new novel ways of using the web. When something like this happens it reminds me of the good old dot-com days when every idea seemed like a good idea. This is a brilliant way to use the web, and could become a new central nexus like Webshots Desktop and the incredibly profound Jonnie Walker's keep walking
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
It wouldn't be /. without a complaint ;)... too bad the camera wasnt' forward looking, instead of sideways, I think it would have been more interesting. Also, on the KS->CO one, it would have shown how amazing the mountains look when they just appear out of nowhere in the last 30 miles before Denver after miles and miles of dull plains. As it was, they didn't even feature.
I had some time on my hands once, so I drove from San Jose to Portland to New York to San Diego and then back home. Oh yeah - and a quick visit to Tijuana, for horse tacos or whatever they put in them. Total miles 7K+ in 10 days (I stayed at each stop for a day or two - other than that it was solid driving).
I'll tell you folks, there ain't that much to see from behind the wheel of a car. It's mostly grass.
Anyone who thinks the US is overpopulated has probably never left their home city.
This is actually pretty neat. When I first opened the pictures; the first area I saw was eastern PA; right where I go to school. Zoom in a bit; and I recognized some of the features in the pictures. I haven't traveled very far away from home and it's cool to be able to see [a tiny sliver of], say, Colorado from here...
I just don't understand why he didn't use a digital camera...probably has something to do with it being under Kodak, I wonder if they sponsored the film or something.
Sounds like my date-cam - a camera on my front door takes a picture of every date as she arrives.
I can't put it up with Flash though. Still on the first roll.
Ah, who am I kidding? It's still on the first frame.
There are too many scenic pictures in there for me to believe this was actually completely automatic and snapped a picture of whatever was in front of the camera as the odometer passed a mile marker.
Additionally, I wish you could enter in a mile number to skip around the photos. It's pretty annoying just trying to get to mile #1 in 1 mile photo increments.
The barn is supposedly where the Last IBM Mainframe ever used at Rose was housed, according to urban legend circa 1982.
--Mike--
There's something fishy with the pictures. Many of them are just *too* picturesque to be believable. Look at pictures 613 and 614, for example; they're both ends of the same service station! The same jeep is even in both pictures! Is this service station really a mile long?
Have you ever driven across the US? I did it four times when I was in the military. The time I drove the speed limited 24ft U-Haul across was not very fun but the other three were. I truely enjoyed the experience. You DO NOT need an SUV or minivan to have a good time, even with a family of four. Most of my fun was because I enjoyed driving my car, a 91 Mustang GT. Nothing great but was relatively new at the time and very well suited for a long highway battle, very stable, no struggling up the hills, not taken by the wind and only 2k rpm's at 80mph.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls.
So that's who's still buying film.
"And like that
Notice on the "slide show" they have Arizona labled "COLORADO".
You'd think a site about photographing the various states of the USA, that they could get the state names right.
I could then put in some coordinates from the GPS, and viola, a cool project.
--Mike--
WoW. Someone just reinvented the video camera. Did anyone else have to read this twice to figure out the real meaning of flash.
of a drive... http://www.geocities.com/srnelson_s2000/ This guy visited 11 western states, one canadian province, and 11 state parks, mainly for the purpose of driving. Lots of cool photos too
A couple years ago my now-wife and I took a road trip in a 19-foot van named MURR! (that was really its name). We took two months, just about, and drove down from Vancouver, BC down to San Diego, across to Texas and New Orleans, up through Kentucky (Hi Amelie!), Ohio and Milwaukee (Hi Melissa!), then to Ontario, across the northern States again, up through Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC...home again, jiggity-jog. All told, 20,700 km (speak metric, American dogs!).
My idea was to get a Super-8 camera and a timer. I calculated that one frame every minute would, over two months, add up to about an hour of footage, which seemed the perfect length for a documentary-ish sort of thing -- narration, music, whatnot.
It was during the leadup to takeoff that I discovered that a camera that could do this wouldn't come cheap -- I think the one place I checked said >$1k, which scared the pants off me. The van and everything else cost a lot more than I'd expected, and as it was we ended up coming back with something like $50 in our pocket (which to my mind means our timing was perfect).
What I would do now is get a laptop and a webcam. I work at a small ISP, and one of our customers is a construction company that has a webcam and a FreeBSD box set up to take time-lapse photography of their latest construction site. The pix and movies are really neat, and that would have been a much easier and cheaper solution.
Crap...just realized that the worst part of me sitting here and reminiscing like this is that the guy's site is sure to be slashdotted now...oh well, I'll wait 'til Sunday when his server's cooled down a bit.
Carousel is a lie!
It only took 102 miles to hit a McDonald's (NY-SF trip).
God Bless America.
He violated the EULA on on both the camera and the car, and he's going to jail for violating the DMCA.
:(
Way nifty
Don't you mean the odometer? You know, the device that tells you how many miles your car has traveled.
if he had aimed the camera out the front instead of the side?
Then the quicktime movie would be much cooler, rather than half the frames being shapeless blurs.
Still a cool idea.
We had the idea of hooking a servo motor up to a laser pointer and a web-cam, and letting people on the web play with the cat! Our cat is really vicious so maybe i'll finally get to play with it that way!
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
"As soon as the thirty-sixth came, I would change rolls, put the exposed roll in a canister, enter its number on a log sheet, take the next one out of the cooler, and insert it. I got to where I could do all that in less than a minute, while steering with my kneecap."
At least he wasn't driving some dangerous vehicle while performing these stunts, like a Ford Explorer!
On his first try, he drove a Porsche and "didn't do enough research," he says. On his next trip, in a high-slung Ford Explorer, he traveled on old highways, mostly U.S. 30, 40 and 50.
Doh?
"And like that
...trying to figure out why on earth this guy would want to log his speed in THIS manner.
Yeah, -O-dometer.
I hate flash, though.
~D
... he'd hooked it up to include the GPS coordinates and orientation of each picture!
Especially considering his photos end up being displayed as about 100x200 pixels, a digital camera would have made this a *ton* easier. Not to mention, if he hadn't gotten sponsored by Kodak, the film (& development) of this would have cost about $3000.
He used his odometer.
He used a camera with FILM.
He didn't have to stop to change the film.
At night he would mark the last mile, find a motel, sleep.
Then he would resume the trip at the last mile.
Ahhhg. Please mod this +5 redundant and email to all your friends for the ultimate in redundacy.
Dont bother watching- all tangent to car! Ugh!
He did this so he could spoof and lie, or maybe do something "arty"
But there is no sense of MOTION
Its all tangent shots out passenger window.
I suspect some is fraudulent (manually taken and placed into "sequence")
I foolishly watched most of it... so boring and flat.
I like the fact that it is ultra hi rez photo film (suitable for projection to audiences because of rez and contrast) but the effort is moot.
Why?
Because it lacks all sense of continuity by filming at that angle.
He should have mounted it forward, or forward on an angle.
I feel cheated for putting up with tolerating the 20 megabyte movie version.
Wouldn't a digital camera have been much easier for this? Just hook it up to a PC Card Type 3 hard drive and store a few Gb of pictures at a time instead of loading film every 36 miles.
For anyone interested. You can look at the pictures without flash by using the URL:
o ad / ostcards/tellYourFriends.shtml?mile=1
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/onTheR
and just changing the mile=# on the end.
Scientists are baffled by the strange distortion in space time near West Jefferson, Ohio as evidenced by frame 613 and 614 of the quicktime movie. Furthermore there appears to be a coverup as the Flash stills don't appear to coincide with the quicktime movie... Someone wants us to avoid asking too many questions about this disturbance. The truth is out there and whatnot... hehe
except he strapped an ATX mobo, DC/DC converter, and a tonne of led acid batteries to his body.
He then ducttaped a webcam to his shoulder and grabbed images every few seconds, saving them to a laptop disk. The next mission was to have that dialed up to a cellphone to post images to the net every few mins - but i dont know how far he got with that.
Damned slashdot broke the url...d
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/onTheRoa
/ postcards/tellYourFriends.shtml?mile=1
I wonder why he didn't just use a digital camera and onboard computer. Seems like it would have been easier to mount a digital camera to a computer which stores all the pictures and tells the camera when to take a picture. That way you wouldn't have to stop. Not to mention if you had nationwide wireless access people could view it as you drive...
imagine a beowolf cluster of these.... ...
well, you get the picture
Now I have proof for my assertion that there is nothing in Kansas. :-)
A speedometer measures a proxy for the current traveling velocity, namely, drive train rotational velocity.
An odometer measures a proxy for the total distance traveled regardless of time.
If you want to trigger something once per mile traveled regardless of time, isn't the odometer what you would use?
[
The ultimate open source - every spot in the world on camera, everybody in the world is everyone elses' big brother => lots of little brothers. I don't see why anybody would want to travel abroad now, just take these pictures in London (England), Macchu Pichu (Andes), ancient ruins as of yet unnamed (Bolivia), Pyramids (Egypt). Personally I can spend a few months at this site alone if it was big enough, honestly. Just look at the success of Webshots and that just spews out pictures of rabbits, mountains, dogs, cats all at random. Nothing can beat the Dallas skyline on a beautiful red sunset evening reflecting off the skyscrapers with hazy-red skyline. Nice. I'm sure there are lots of other places with views just as spectacular but nobody has ever been there or heard of it.
For instance, an architect would love to see places with beautiful buildings, the travel agent doesn't give two hoots about what building is where and who made it. This architect can just log on and see the building structure in Spain, France, Canada, Russia, heck even Vietnam and other thrid world countries.
A computer programmer would want to see the last remaining building with a VAX inside to mourn (or last Win 95 machine to celebrate), the travel agent would have no idea what he is talking about, but the computer programmer could call up any worlwide location at will so it's not a problem.
I can't imagine how many people there are in Oklahoma or whatever that can't afford travelling to Canada or France or England or Mexico or Brazil. This way they can get one heck of a taste. Brilliant idea, I'll be watching this closely.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
No need for Flash.... Quicktime and Javascript=OK
I did not try to see if they were using Flash WITHIN the Quicktime (Apple supports this in QT 3 to 5)
But it seems like standard streaming quicktime.
YOu can go watch his movie with Quicktime and Javascript alone with no need for flash.
As soon as the thirty-sixth came, I would change rolls, put the exposed roll in a canister, enter its number on a log sheet, take the next one out of the cooler, and insert it. I got to where I could do all that in less than a minute, while steering with my kneecap.
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It's probably more useful to hook up a camera to a GPS system. That way, not only can you snap a picture every mile, you can also record where exactly it was snapped without having to make guesses.
The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls. Sad thing is, I understand this. (I still love film).
But this sounds like a situation where a digital camera is better suited. The purpose of this is not to create single great photos, where film is still much better suited, but to create a series of photos to be strung together and viewed as an animation or hypermedia/nonlinear form.
Connect the digital camera to a laptop, and let the laptop monitor the odometer. The computer can click off the photos at the appropriate intervals, download them, and rescale them on the fly (for f in *.jpg; do djpeg $f | pnmscale -xy 640 480 | cjpeg -q 85 > s-$f && rm $f; done). Or with sufficient disk space, you might not need to rescale the photos. At any rate, let the computer manage the image acquisition - never stop to change film, never fill up the camera's flash memory, and stop only for gas and Dr Pepper.
As someone who loves to make timelapses with my Kodak DC290, I have actually though of doing something like this - mounting the camera in the car and programming it to take photos every 30 to 60 seconds. Syncing to the odometer is a cool touch!
--Jim
wouldn't it be his odometer?
You Like Science?
You Like bottomquark.
Its a HOAX (semi hoax) not linearly contiguous
WAy too many scenice pictures even if you tried to hit every single small town possible it is way too supiciously populated with nice scenic house shots.
Why no mountain scenes.... ho hum.
I wish the camera pointed forward (even a little) so that each frame could be matched in linear order for proof of continuity.
As it stands.... its too ripe with fraud.
This is a really cool Idea, but I can see the obvious improvements... hood mounted weather proof camera, maybe a digital cam hooked up to a laptop for high quality shots without replacing the film ever 36 miles.
I counted 3304 miles, at 36 miles/roll... that's 92 rolls of film. By the time he gets done
$8 per roll and $15 for development...
well, 92*(8+15)=$2116 plus tax- that's not including wear and tear or gas.
unless kodak fronted him some film, this seems REALLY expensive...
I think I'd like to see someone do this with a really nice digital cam and a laptop for less- just to see if it can be done.
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This person's project is actually a very crude version of a special camera system used by many state transportation authorities to map freeways.
I believe that California's CalTrans has special movies that show the view out front on a freeway that has pictures taken every 50 feet or so. I remember seeing a news report on KCRA (Sacramento's main TV station) about these pretty amazing movies.
But the pictures all came out like this.
Maybe I shouldn't have driven at night...
this is the kind of project where technology in the form of a digital camera would have been nice :) This is a cool project though. No matter how good digitals get, nothing bets a good 35mm
Do they say when this trip happened?
In the pictures from Denver I noticed a picture of McNichols Arena with the new Mile Stadium being built right next to it. McNichols hasn't existed(demolished) for at least a year, probably 2 years.
When i drove from CT, CA in 3 days, i took rolls of picture while driving of, landmarks, and pictures of speedlimit signs, with my speedometer in the frame. one shot in colorado was a 75mph zone, and i was going 126mph, and there was a vw passat overtaking me.
Michael Naimark, a famous interactive artist, put something similar together many years ago here in California. His project was based on Caltrans footage that was taken at 100 frames per mile along El Camino Real in Silicon Valley. Looks like it was done in 1975 and 1987. Check it out at http://www.naimark.net/projects/elcamino.html
Wasn't Matt the same guy that's been on those Subway commercials 'cause he lost a ton of weight eating subs? Man this guy gets around...
</humor>
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
\begin{nitpick}
It would be more like 13,000 MPH if it only took fifteen minutes. 600 MPH would take about five and a half hours.
(3300 miles / 0.25 hours = 13200 miles/hour)
(3300 miles / (600 miles/hour) = 5.5 hours)
\end{nitpick}
The odometer is also tied into this.. in fact, most odometers of the past several years have used stepper motors to turn the digits. In the past 2 years most manufacturers have dispensed with that completely and gone to a digital display.
-
Speedometer measures speed. Odometer measures distance. I don't even have to read the article to see that detail.
I must say, after looking through these pics, I have to conclude that Kansas is the most boring state...EVER! Each picture looks exactly the same, except for new clouds. Though it only beats out Nevada my a small margin, I'm just a bigger fan of the desert scene. Colorado is by far the coolest state...
Let's see, there were some VR guys that mounted a camera on a bike and took side-looking photos every few feet through some Colorado town, and put together a VR tour of the place. I'm moving in a month or so and wanted to do the same for where I've lived for the past decade.
Games magazine once had a puzzle consisting of a dozen photos along a very similar route; the goal was to put them into the proper order. It wasn't too hard for me, as I've driven from my house (St. Louis, MO) to my then-mother-in-law's house (Columbus, OH) more times that I can count. Going the other direction, some friends from college and I drove to Colorado for spring skiing for way too many years. So, yeah, I know I-70 pretty well.
A year ago, I drove my oldest son to Boston to attend college and took pictures with a PalmPix almost every step of the way, mostly of things that had always intriged me but that I hadn't seen for years. In particular, there used to be an old barn just east of the Indiana-Ohio state line that was painted with one of the old Apollo pictures of Earth rising over the lunar horizon. It was gone (or repainted) on my last trip through, so don't bother looking for it now. If anyone has any recollections, or better yet pictures, post a reply to this.
Well, that's all for now, I guess. I'm going to scroll through those pictures looking for things that I recognize.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
looks like he hacked his odometer, not his speedometer. Odometers click off the miles, speedometers tell you how fast yer goin'.
I read the post and envisioned a flash sequence of speedometer readings - ooh look, he's back up at 85 again... doh must've been pulled over, we're stopped.
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Here are your answers:
. "I drove the Interstates with a 35-mm wide-angle lens. Interstates bypass small-town America, and when I-70 goes through the Rocky Mountains, you just get close-up rock faces. Besides, the car was so low-slung I got a lot of guardrails."
"Every time a mile ended, a device attached to the odometer made an electric contact that triggered the shutter release. If a cement wall or other nearby object blocked the view, he had a switch that would delay a picture for a moment. "
Non illegemati carborundum est!
I'm not sure where you're looking but this is what I see:
[613] - Picture of a service station
[614] - Picture of an empty field
-- Find the Truth...
can i hack my mouse so that a picture is taken everytime i click? would be great for point and click adventures, u could keep a record of what u;ve done! well, jsut a thought... in need of KARMA.. LOL
Fight Crime - Shoot Back!
Uhh... what's the big deal with Flash? You realize it is supported by Galeon, Konqueror, Mozilla, ... ??
Where are the ones of him hopping out of his car to buy more film - you'd of thought it would make a great Kodak moment, wouldn't ya?
If only I had more time to do this, I could take beautiful images just like this guy did. This picture, for example, somes it all up for me.
That's true for high-end professional cameras. However, if you go grab a point-and-shoot or even a mid-line SLR, you're not going to get umpteen bazillion photos on one roll.
Your average camera simply doesn't have the capacity on the takeup reel to hold more than an average amount of film.
$15 dollars for development, what are you on. In Canada (read half dollars) a 1 hour development costs $6.99, and for a 48-week even less. 8 dollars a roll you must be crazy, 8 dollars should get you about 3 rolls in Canada.
Quick, quick, everybody, before it gets slashdoted!
An American flag on Slashdot is supposed to mean "bad news". What is it doing on this story?
I misunderstood. I tought it meant he took a picture of the speedometer every mile. For some reason, I was strangely disappointed to find that this was not the case.
Now I just hope that I don't slashdot the sight.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Wouldn't it have been easier to hook the camera to his odometer, instead of the speedometer?
Hey, maybe you could rig it to take a photo every time your speed drops below 50 mph. You might get some exciting pictures of stoplights, motels, convenience stores, etc.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Pretty low resolution shots, higher ones would be nicer.
Drove from California to Texas in '99 and from Texas to CA this year (even took route 66!!) and I missed the chance to have Kodak sponsor my trip.... awwwww damn!!
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
either way, its not a mile away from itself...
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
I looked across all the images mile/mile.
2500-3000ish he has the horizon set up perfect so they almost blend.
Driving across the US takes days... But that web site took me less than 10 minutes to rapid click through.
They need to make some mach 30 travel device. Get from one end of the US to the other in 10 minutes.
God spoke to me
Motion Blur will depend not only on your shutter speed and travelling speed but also on the 'actual width of object on the picture' which is a function of your camera design, lens and distance to the object.
Let's say you're travelling at 30m/s (approx. 70mph), shutter speed is set to 1/125.
a) Picture of a house wall, zoomed such that a width of 10m would be visible on the picture. You end up with (30/125)m = 0.24m or 2.4% of blur:
On a 1024x768 monitor each pixel would be stretched to 25 pixels. Pretty blurry but probably still recognizable.
b) Picture of a far away landscape, zoomed such that a width of 10km would be visible on the picture. Blur is still 0.24m but now it's only 0.0024% of the picture width.
On the 1024x768 monitor that would be only about 0.02 pixels -- and thus not noticable at all.
bla
Sorry for complaining, but I really think the interface could have been made better. For one thing, I wish clicking on the map could make the highlighted section scroll as far as the mouse cursor to the left/right. OTOH, having each mile on the line marked and clickable would probably take a very long time, not to mention very memory intensive for the browser.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
He didn't actually make it. He's on the Marin County side of the GG bridge in his last shot, not the SF County side. (So close, but so far!)
I've seen plenty of places where flash is used well to do things that otherwise couldn't be done. Despite all the anti-flash sentiment around here, it's not flash or macromedia itself which sucks, it's designers which insist on making kludgy, overbranded, full-flash sites which suck. Macromedia is actually trying to educate its users about usability and trying to encourage them in the next flash.
Flash ain't a bad tool, but only in the right places, and this is one of the better uses I've seen...
I will add this functionality to the dashpc now that I have the ODBII link working. I will config it to snap a pic every mile and upload them to the website. Since it's automated, you'll be able to get the pics ever time I pull into the parking garage...
Cheers,
CB
Here's the link for those whom care:
dashpc.com
sourceforge.net
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I think this is a neat art project, but this would have been much easier to do with a digital camera, GPS, and a latop. No stopping to change rolls of film. No worrying about sequencing the rolls. Easier to make into a flash movie. A hell of a lot cheaper to process.
I do like this idea. I may have to try it on my motorcycle for my next long trip.
Am I seeing these pictures wrong, or is the camera pointed out the side window? IMHO, it would have been much cooler if a wide-angle lens had been used and the camera pointed out the _front_ window.
From a side-view perspective, it just looks like 3,000+ random shots of cows, farmland, etc. No continuity.
When I first read the headline, I thought maybe some guy had hooked up his digital camera to take a picture of something whenever he reached certain speeds.
Chrisd, your odometer is the thing that tells you how many miles you've gone. Your speedometer is the thing that tells you how fast you're going.
Sorry for being picky - this just bugged me.
Hey guys, I am having trouble seeing this Kodak's page in both Lynx and Links. Whats up?
Some years ago, some dude here in Iceland did hookup a movie camera to a car's odometer and took one frame every kilometer. Then he drove road no. 1, the road that more or less circles the country, and made a 1 hr. movie out of it. I have only seen parts of it, and it is really weird, AFAIR, you more or less follow the speed of sound.
Here is the result, btw.
He should have used an Olympus OM-2 and a 250-exposure film back so he didn't have to change rolls as often. Take that, Canon weenies! :-)
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Went through these, fun to see that they went pretty close to my permanent home (huber heights, ohio -- east of vandalia, ohio on the map) and I think the closest picture to my home is #666! Huber Heights, Ohio the mark of the beast indeed. Well, we did have a kenny rogers roasters restaurant for a while.....yech.
And for once I'm glad to see an application of flash that is interactive, well-designed, doesn't attempt to cause epileptic seizures AND doesn't try to sell me something.
Here's a copy of the e-mail I sent to the guy in the story:
Hi, Matt,
I bet you are going to get lots of people telling you they have done something similiar as you did; taking photos practically every foot of a long trip. I know I can relate! I bought a digital camera in March 2000, and, since then, I've taken about 5000 pictures. When I flew from Dallas, Texas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, I constantly took pictures, often in rapid shot mode. I often joked that I must have take a picture of every mile between Dallas and Albuquerque. I wasn't being serious, but now I see you are!
My co-workers often kid me about my picture taking. One of the women at work came in one morning and said that she had parked next to my pickup truck. She said, "I assumed it was your truck; I don't know anyone else who would have a camera tripod in the passenger seat." I take pictures when I'm driving, when I'm bicycling and when I'm walking. Some day, I'd like to create a virtual world of all these photos, so that people could see what different places are like.
A few weeks ago, my camera stopped working, and I had to send it in to the factory (I'm using an Olympus C-3040, now). One of the managers at the gym asked me where my camera was. My dentist asked me where my camera was. My co-workers asked me where my camera was. Everyone knows that I don't go anywhere without my camera. Another manager at the gym managed to tell me with a straight face, "I think everyone should do that."
The first year (actually, 9 months), I put all my pictures from the year on a CD that I gave to my family members. I wasn't able to fit them all the second year. Oddly enough, no one seemed terribly upset when I failed to send out my CD the second year.
One of the nice things about the C-3040 is that it can take short movies. I like to drive around Texas, taking 1-minute movies. I can fit four of them on a 128-Meg card. Even before I bought a digital camera, before I moved to Dallas, I had the dream of outfitting my car with cameras, so that I could capture all the crazy things that people do in traffic. I was working as a newspaper deliveryman at the time, driving 100 miles a day across a town that is only about 15 miles wide, so I saw lots of crazy driving. I regret that I've captured so little of it in photos. My latest in-my-head design would use 3 cameras, each pointed out in a circle, and mounted on my truck's roof, to capture 360 degrees of craziness.
(There is another guy, I think he is in Louisiana or Georgia, who also tries to take pictures of crazy drivers. He also has his camera mounted on a tripod in the passenger seat of his car. I had my dream before I saw his work, but he had his set up before I got mine set up. He has many of his traffic pictures on a Web page.)
Good luck on your picture taking. I think, though, that you would be better switching to digital...
Sincerely,
Richard Alexander
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
This was done MANY years ago on Iceland's Ring Road using a rigged 35mm movie camera. The taking of the pictures was timed (I dont remember how many FEET between pictures) so that the playback of the movie resulted in a trip around Iceland at 60mph. From the front. Traffic and all.
I remember hearing about the film on NPR and it was going around the US being shown at places like the University of Pennsyltucky...
Why do these pictures had to have beeen taken on separate trips. In Missouri/Kansas (I can't remember exactly, but I'm not about to go back and find it) he passed a Ford dealer. The Ford dealer was still selling new Aerostar minivans and Escorts as well as 1st generation Explorers similar to his. (Note the large numbers of mid-80's autos throughout Ohio.) However, at mile 3278 a current body style Jeep Grand Cherokee (introduced in 1997) is clearly pictured. I know I'm being picky, and it is one of the coolest projects I've seen in a long time.
We apologise for the fault in the thanks loop. Those responsible have been sacked.
Thank you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...
We apologise again for the fault in these acknowledgements. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
so it would still have been interesting for them to sponsor the trip, even if it didn't use film.
Say no to software patents.
...but the site requires JavaScript be enabled.
Now my fat kids dont have to get away from the computer to play "Eye Spy", they can just surf across the country from home!
Seriously though, notice the hick with the pile of crap in the back of the pickup at mile 1284?
How bout the buttcrack on that guy a couple miles earlier. It took me almost 600 miles of searching before he passed the first person I saw. (Granny and Grandpa, of course.)
I can see a whole game of scavanger hunt built around this thing.
One thing that struck me, Jersey looks a lot better than I imagined. Way to go guys!
Picture 412 is of downtown Pittsburgh, PA... which also happens to be one of their telephone area codes!
Intelligent Life on Earth
You're a little bit off there. A 100 foot roll of bulk load film is good for about 18 rolls, 36 exposures each. 36*18 = 648 exposures, not 800.
Also, the equipment you linked to doesn't appear to work with any autofocus Nikon bodies, something that I think would be pretty vital in this situation.
On that note, I would use a Canon body. The optics are nearly as good as Nikon, and the autofocus system is much faster, and in my experience, more reliably hits the objects you really wanted.
What the heck are those features? It's Aliens, I tell you! Aliens!
Actually, much of the "mountain" states is on high plateaus and is relatively flat. Especially if you stay on interstates, which largely follow old railroad lines which were deliberately routed on flat terrain.
However you still hit "hiccups" of mountain ranges. I-90 through Montana is especially noteworthy in this regard. If only the RV drivers understood that they might climb hills faster than semis and other RVs, but a sports car over the horizon can maintain 80 MPH even when climbing and *will* soon be on their ass if thet get in the left-most lane.
If I had run a camera like that, I would have only shown pictures of high plains and the back end of RVs.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
... although I realize that it's meant to sell film.
I think my son and his friends did a much better job with this kind of art (travelogue movie made from still images). Here's a sampling of what can be done with an ancient Quicktake 200 digital camera, a Powerbook, a Ford Explorer, and a little post-processing with Adobe Premiere:PassingTime195-1.mpg
The 195-1 refers to the ratio of time spent on the trip to time in the movie.