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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?
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.
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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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
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).
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.
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?
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
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
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...
Sigh. Only on slashdot. Who cares what [apple]-shift-3 does when this picture is only two pictures to the left.
I mean, there's a freakin' G5 box in that picture. Those things are awesome ; )
Maybe not
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.
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
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
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