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Homemade Digital Cameras
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."
That is some eerie art! Is your initial part of your last name really pronounced "Golem" by chance?
Very cool effects. When I read the snippet I figured this was going to be something like the old "Make an E-size scanner out of any hand scanner" fraud that was popular for a few years back in the old days (remember stitching manually on a Pentium 200, anyone?).
For some reason I can't believe this works. I figured the scanning element (CCD) needed an intense amount of light to properly "read" an image on the bed.
The fact that you use duct tape to get everything "light tight" put a good smile on my face, as well as the fact that you even got this working. If you're thinking of selling artwork, I'll be the first in line (the lady and I realized it's time for more photo-prints in the house). By the way, the image taken of the actual camera doesn't seem very high res. Was this by choice?
If it's the look and effect you are going for, you can achieve that more easily with a regular digital camera and a bit of post-processing.
I don't see hwo you'd do that without a lot of photoshop work (go and look at some of the fun distortions they get due to the way a scanner scans the image).
Well, well. Since the quality exceeds those provided by "consumer-level" equipment, how are these guys going to deal with the Digital Transition Content Security Act?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I will need a pickup truck to take this along on my next vacation.
The grayscale, banding, and vignetting are easy.
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.
Opened a path to new computer technologies and related devices
Salvador Dali meets a camera. Brilliant stuff!
What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable gipsy obscenity?
Sticking 25+ mb images on your server and submitting it for a slashdotting.
Still, quite cool. He did a good job of describing the effects - made it informative, yet simple enough for most people to understand.
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This has got to be one of the more fun geek mod projects. I'm definately assembling one. Got to keep an eye out on Ebay for a suitable camera. A great new use for my notebook. I'd love to try some shots at a carnivale. The spinning rides would make for some interesting shots. I'd love to try some high res landscapes though. Could also do some stunning macro photography as well.
If you rtfa it's because the distortion from a camera like this is because it captures the image in a series of scan lines, each scanline is a small exposure, but the entire picture is made up of thousands of slices. This is different from a regular digital camera where the entire sensor is exposed which gives a motion blur effect. A scanner camera does not give you motion blur but actual clear distortion as the world changes during the exposure.
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.
So that's one point. But more broadly, it seems to me to be a bit more organic than using photoshop. He says the effect is reletively predictable, but given unpredictable environments, such as cars on a road, the picture could end up more interesting than anything you could concieve and then coerce into existance
Finally, I really, really, really don't understand why these types of comments are made. Every bloody hack article there's some grim, sad comments about how the hack sucks because a) it could be done easier in some other way, b) it's 'pointless', c) it's 'try-hard', or whatever other reason. It's so infuriating - do you have any sense of exploration and experimentation? Or understand the desire to tell others about your experiences?
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
Disable the motor (maybe just remove the carriage), and set it up to take pictures of things going past it. Cameras like this are used at finish lines at athletic meets. Interesting distortion. Might be an interesting project for someone still at school - I was once around the teachers trying to work out who won a 100m dash: some of them were a little bald(er) by the end of the day.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
This is kinda similar to the technology they use for doing photo-finishes in track & field races.
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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.
Kayamon
It seems he figured out how to script the camera to take continuous photos, and animated them into movies. Unfortunately, these movies require Flash 8 to play, and the latest Linux Flash Player is v7! This is the second site today that has kept me from viewing content because of this issue (though in this case it simply seems inadvertent; by contrast, you can't access any of animationmentor.com with Linux).
If you rtfa it's because the distortion from a camera like this is because it captures the image in a series of scan lines, each scanline is a small
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?
I find it hard to believe that he can get 115 megapixels out of that scanner. Since he is using a 4x5 camera, that works out to a scanner resolution of 2400dpi. That is the kind of resolution of high-end film scanners, not a cheap flatbed (whatever the marketing material says).
lhk
Nice. My first thought was that it would be just one of the many how-to-make-your-own-digital-camera articles that have been around for ages at Make magazine and other similar media... so a lot nicer and more creative than that. And now I want to find an old, old camera, with an old flatbed scanner and try some of that stuff myself.
Back in the early 90's Dicomed introduced a digital camera back for 4x5 cameras for commercial use. It used the same theory, slap a scanner on the back of the camera. You had to use hot lamps, a studio environment and nothing could move. But the results were stunning, 100MB files that could easily be printed on the cover of a 150 line screen magazine. Wonderful.. What is really cool about your work is that you are celebrating all of the motion artifacts that studios were killing themselves to remove when using this technology. Your stuff is pretty creative and fun, and most importantly makes one look at the world differently.
This effect is impossible to create to anything near this level of detail or clarity using traditional digital tools.
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.
Interesting project, it reminds me of the digital camera I built with a fellow student as a degree project. We ground the top of a 256 byte DRAM using a grinding machine in the mech.eng lab and fitted a glass window. The DRAM capacitors discharge at a different rate when exposed to light. We mounted the chip to a PCB, cut the back out of a 35mm Zenith camera and mounted the PCB. Obviously the optics and chip were poorly matched, we were only using a small part of the lens.
Knowing the discharge rate of the DRAM and the time to load and scan all 256 elements you could get a black and white image. We used the camera for some image recognition work. One application was counting the number of cups remaining in a drinks machine hopper by edge detecting the image then counting the "lips" that we saw.
That was back in the autumn of 1986. We've come a long way.
For fuck's sake. I've got a Horizont, several large-format cameras, and a Panoscan. I still think this is cool. Not everybody can afford the equipment I use, and none of it is exactly the same as this, anyway. Good art is still made with disposable cameras. Why have a chip on your shoulder about non-elitist equipment?
... and then they built the supercollider.
The scanner software that comes with the scanner he's presently using shuts the thing down if there are hardware faults. All his mods count as hardware faults thus making the shipped driver useless to him. He discusses a closed source pro driver which is a bit better, but still not perfect for his needs. Then explains how he uses SANE to make the thing actually work like he wants.
That's cool -- an artist embarks on getting enough programming language to modify a program so he can use it like he wants to. That's owning your hardware in the purest sense. And it's made possible by the community that generates all that great open source software.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
"They are well over 100 mexapixel in resolution..."
Does that mean each pixel can hold 100 mexicans worth of optical information?
First, what does [apple]-shift-3 do? Apparently in Panther it takes a screenshot, but why is that cool enough to get tattooed on your neck?
And second, why on earth is this so hot? Mmmmf.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You mean like Technicolor? Or like Autochrome? Or like three-CCD analog camcorders, digital cameras, and digital camcorders?
Pshaw. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii did it first.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Why have a chip on your shoulder about non-elitist equipment?
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 is one link. Here's another one. There have been a number of other variations, including leaving the scanner in the film plane of a LF camera.
But nobody claimed this. The article says:
The examples you provide are not provided by the standard use of traditional equipment. The article does not claim this effect has never been done before.
What do you mean by "better"? Art is very subjective, there is no absolute scale of goodness. Does it matter that Andy Warhol used mediums that many other people used?
... and then they built the supercollider.
You'll find it in Goethe. I can't remember the original word for word, but in effect he says that without working within restrictions we never reach the highest levels of achievement; whoever wants to make something great must submit to the limitations of some medium. This guy has found a restricted medium that can be used to produce something like art. Arguments about megapixels are as irrelevant as arguments about how fine Renaissance artists could grind up their paint.
Pining for the fjords
Putting aside for a moment the artistic effects, this project could be turned in a distortion-free ultra-cheap ultra-hi-res digital camera. You only need to "fix" the image so that it stands still while the scanner works. For example, you could expose to light a plate covered with some photo-sensitive chemical (like, for example, a silver halide) and then putting that in front of the scanner. I wonder why nobody thought of this before...
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
This seems to be actually repeating early developments in professional digital photography. The first digital backs for cameras like the Sinar, and the Arca Suisse were miniaturized flatbed scanners like that. Obviously they were really good only for still life. But still (back in 1992 or so) when I was in photographers school and we visited someone who had one of those backs, we managed a portrait of someone sitting very still. There were little smears where his breathing caused motion.
Sadly we did not experiment with more motion. I think the "experimenting" with motion is the interesting part (as far as photography is concerned). Some of the pictures on the site are enjoyable. Hacking it all together yourself is interesting too, at least for us geeks.
As for the comments in the style of "large format photography is only about the image quality"... it isn't exactly only about that. It is also about stuff like parallax control (putting buildings "upright" with parallel lines) and depth of field control (laying the plane of the depth of field folded through the scene in order to allow image to be sharp on other areas). All this can theoretically be achieved even with smaller formats, but due to mechanics it gets harder the smaller the format (Arca Suisse's 6x9cm cameras seem to be the smallest that still work very well, at least in my experience).
Therefore the "experiments" done with this hack to in a line a bit with stuff like putting ordinary photographic paper into a large format camera or using polaroids for transfer prints. The "long exposure" part of it is also a reference to the times way back, when due to old processes like the daguerreotype, portrait subjects were held up with wire constructions. Very cool, all of this hack, congratulations.
Andrew Davidhazy has done similar things at the Imaging and Photographic Technology
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Rochester Institute of Technology years ago. His site is interesting
http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/
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
It's an individual accomplishment, and perhaps he discovered this himself. If you discovered an algorithm, made an invention, or such by virtue of your own intellect and effort, wouldn't you think it were nice? And that you wanted to share it?
Just ease up a little. Don't be so picky about prior art. ; )
Then you should ask for your money back; that's pathetic.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Yeah, maybe he should just strap three of these together and post-process in Photoshop.
Well, post-processing actually only works on the image you have in front of you. Given that the scanner exposes individual lines in the image over time (e.g. it - "scans") to generate the end image, you would actually need a movie to be able to generate the same effect with post-processing. A movie with very high-quality frames, and an unbelievably high frame rate (effectively you would want a frame for each line, so depending on the scan speed up to perhaps a few thousand frames a second - and then you would throw out the entire frame except the single line you wanted.) The scanner idea is starting to sound better to me.
On a more general note, this whole attitude is endemic now. Sure you can correct stuff later, but it is generally better in photography to try to get the best image you can at the moment you are taking it; you've then have got a lot more to work with! The phrase "polishing a turd" comes to mind...
The similarities with slit-scan photography immediately stood out to me as well.
For anyone that's interested, there's a reasonably good page describing the technique here and pages about it's application in the stargate sequence of 2001 here and here.
It's possible to fake the technique in Adobe aftereffects with the time displacement filter too.
I remember reading about a similar attempt using EPROMs in late '80s. In a normal recycling procedure, these were erased by shining a high intensity UV light for a couple of minutes through the glass window that's present in the IC shielding. After making sure all bits are reset, the window is covered by a sticker or label. Then the data is 'burned' and the (typically 256Kb/32KB) ROM was inserted into your BBC micro (insert favorite hobby computer).
Similar to the process you describe, an image could be gathered by setting all bits to 1 (or actually 0, as EPROMs have negative logic), then waiting for bits to flip. I don't think a lense was used, just a diafragm (dot in piece of black paper). On average, an exposure took 1-4 hours (and resulted in a very poor quality black/white image for current standards) if the scene was bright enough. Lighting the scene with a UV helped a bit, though visible light worked surprisingly well.
Of course, the whole whing was hardly useful, but remember that - at the time - the average micro had little more periferals than a keyboard, joystick. Mac had a mouse and some MSX systems had support for an analog "gen-locked" camera, BBC had some support for light pens. There may have been handscanners for PC/ATs. So mostly any hardware that would allow translation from analog to digital was greedily welcomed.
This is somehow similar to mobile phone cameras. Some of them are very slow too:
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http://dimss.solutions.lv/samsung-phone-camera.ht
Dude, you should let me be your slashdot dupe checker. I'm pretty confident that this was on Slashdot the last time it happened. I was a bit impressed by this guys contraptions so I guess I remember the URL, here you go. http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html
http://www.scannerphotography.com.nyud.net:8090/
With that many pictures I would have used the coral cache link in the summary.
You can get a similar effect, at much poorer resolution, by processing digital video of a pan. You take a narrow slice out of each frame, and append them together into a scanned image.
I've played with this and got some images I'm very pleased with. However it's spurred me into wanting to hack some scanner hardware. Unfortunately I'm more comfortable with software than I am with the mechanical...
I wrote up the video to panorama stuff.
You have to set the scan area as small as possible.
I had to prop the lid open a tiny bit, which left tiny shadows, as if the chips were floating above a white surface.
Site temporarily down - too many people looking! Sorry... I'll sort it out soon. Mike
Is there anyway to disassemble a scanner to create a fast server?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Taking apart a scanner and assembling a device to bring down his web server. Oh, wait...
My wife used to have a jewelry business, and I did all the product photography for her.
At first I tried using film; but the turnaround time, even with 1-hour developing is a drag, because it's tough to get everything Just Right, when you're dealing with highly-reflective and very small objects. So, we discovered that it's much easier to just drop the stuff onto a flatbed scanner and do a hi-res scan. The old HP scanner I had at the time had a really deep depth-of-field and a nice wide, diffused light source, so even non-flat pieces came out very nice. And, you could stick colored paper or cloth on top of the product for fun backgrounds - propped-up a bit if you needed to get the background out of focus.
Then that scanner died and I couldn't find another scanner that would duplicate the DOF and diffused light source. So I bought a digital camera.
But, boring story short: if you can find a scanner with the right DOF, you can do some really great macro stuff with it. 4000dpi at 1:1 shows a surprising amout of fine detail.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Well, I didn't expect that to happen... My bandwidth limit was drastically exceed this morning. As you know. Luckily, some great people have offered me a bit of help... so you can see the project again. I've put up a link on ww2w.scannerphotography.com Thanks so much for looking at my work... I hope you enjoy it! Mike Golembewski
Next time try some Gaffer's Tape... reknowned in the studio photography world to stick like a sumbitch, leave no residue when peeled away, and block light completely. It's a high-threadcount black cotton tape with masking tape adhesive, and it realy is dark-safe.
SoupIsGood Food
35mm SLRs have mechanical shutters. Most (not all) work by releasing two curtains in sequence. The first retracts from one side to the other, letting light reach the film. The second extends in the same direction shortly thereafter, covering the film again. What you get, then, especially for short exposures, is a negative which was exposed at different times from one edge to the other. Normally you can't see this effect, but it is possible to capture (or miss, depending on the direction of motion) highspeed events in the field of view.
Essentially the shutter mechanism is acting like a mechanical line-scan.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
combine this with some really wild slit/film configurations, and you can get some interesting images... check out what andrew davidhazy is doing with moving slit photography, especially some of this stuff. he even has some articles discussing scanner derived camera backs here and here
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin