How One Photographer Is Hacking the Concept of Time

An anonymous reader writes "Hungarian photographer Adam Magyar doesn't work like most artists. He takes the world's most sophisticated photographic equipment, then hacks it with software he writes himself — all in order to twist our perception of time inside out. In this latest story from the digital publisher MATTER, Joshua Hammer discovers how Magyar's unique combination of technology and art challenges the way we understand the world. At one point, Magyar realized he needed a 'slit-scan' camera, 'the type used to determine photo finishes at racetracks and at Olympic sporting events by capturing a time sequence in one image. Such cameras were rare and cost many thousands of dollars, so Magyar set out to build one himself. He joined a medium-format camera lens to another sensor and wrote his own software for the new device. Total cost: $50. He inverted the traditional scanning method, where the sensor moves across a stationary object. This time, the sensor would remain still while the scanned objects were in motion, being photographed one consecutive pixel-wide strip at a time. (This is the basic principle of the photo-finish camera.) Magyar mounted the device on a tripod in a busy Shanghai neighborhood and scanned pedestrians as they passed in front of the sensor. He then digitally combined over 100,000 sequential strips into high-resolution photographs.' There are pictures and videos interspersed throughout the article."

Comments

Re:$50...if your time is worth nothing

[SJHillman]

As long as it doesn't take away from another activity, then the cost of time is nothing. If this were not the case, then it would never be cheaper to cook at home rather than go to a restaurant.

Re:huh...

[gstoddart]

Not so much "Hacking the Concept of Time" as "Hacking camera software to change how it takes pictures"

Let me guess, you either didn't read the article, or didn't understand it:

Magyar mounted the device on a tripod in a busy Shanghai neighborhood and scanned pedestrians as they passed in front of the sensor. He then digitally combined over 100,000 sequential strips into high-resolution photographs.

He's not taking a single exposure. He's taking a very large amount of small slices over a span of time, and stitching them together into a single image.

He hasn't so much taken a 'snapshot in time' like a traditional camera, he's made images out of snapshots which occurred across time.

Which means he's taking objects going by at a pretty good clip, and combining a whole lot of them into something which looks like a single astounding image.

Some of his images have a time lapse quality to them, because they show things which are both in motion and still, over a time sequence:

Eerie distortions of objects in motion and at rest reminded viewers that they were looking at a pictorial representation of time, not space. Speeding buses were compressed into Smart cars. Individuals who paused at a bus stop were elongated like Metroliners. Slower walkers had billowing pants legs, or feet like skis, or Oscar Pistorius-style blades. And because of the peculiar nature of the scanning technology, everyone was moving in the same direction. "The horizontal axis is not about space, it's not about left and right, it's about earlier and later," he says. "If two people are crossing the pixel at the same moment, they will look like they are walking together."

If you read the article, you'll find he's done much much more than "Hacking camera software to change how it takes pictures" -- the resulting images look like a still frame, but are composited from a time lapse, and are MUCH more sophisticated than you seem to realize.

Why do people on Slashdot persist in dismissing things they don't really understand? What he's done is taken what look like still images, but are in fact a cross section in time.

That you think all he's done is to hack camera software means you don't have the barest idea of what it is he's actually done.