Slashdot Mirror
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."
>> wrote his own software for the new device. Total cost: $50.
Sure, if the time to write the software was worth nothing.
There's an free iPhone app to simulate a slit-scan camera. It doesn't take a "$50,000 camera".
So his last name is "Hungary" in Hungarian? What an amazing coincidence! Like Lou Gehrig .. what are the odds that he got the disease named "Lou Gehrig's Disease"!
(I got nothing)
Wrong. Some of his work is pretty wild, especially the vids. Really cool stuff, this.
Seriously even though people do things I could care less for, its awesome to see what "ONE" person can do and how imaginative they can be. Stuff like this is what use to drive me to "build" things when I was kid. Damn all those days drooling over parts and tools at Radio Shack.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This is the same photographic technique used to create the stargate special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but putting the camera on a trolley and zooming it in. Here's a really good video on the evolution of the technology. http://youtu.be/KhRo2WbWnKU
For artistic slit scan photography, check out Jay Mark Johnson's work. It's much more interesting than this stuff, imo.
Not so much "Hacking the Concept of Time" as "Hacking camera software to change how it takes pictures"
"How one renegade photographer is hacking the concept of time."
"Time doesn't exist for him."
Anyone remember a similarly fawning article about how the greeks don't have strict time concepts in their language?
It's because so few of them go to work on time.
The website where the story article is hosted is pretty terrible. It's apparently based entirely on some sort of JavaScript hacks. I can only zoom one photo before the JavaScript code crashes. Then, when I try to reload, it loses the position I was on the page. I also dislike those texts and images that change brightness and scroll in dis-syncronization with the rest of the page. Not to speak of those "Share" buttons jumping out from behind page elements when I move my mouse cursor around. This page, although apparently meant to be "artistic", is sadly just a staple of horrible and dysfunctional web design.
Really, this guy didn't need a "slit-scan" camera. Any linescan camera would work. They're not rare. They're used everywhere for industrial inspection. You can find them on eBay for under a hundred dollars. Yes, you'll need to put a lens on it as well, but most are compatible with normal camera lenses. You'll just need a mount adapter.
Heck, you could even do this in post-processing using a normal 2-D camera that's capturing a movie. Just snag a single column from successive frames and stack them into a single picture. Sure, your frame rate will be limited, but it's technically feasible, especially if the 2-D sensors allow for windowing to increase frame rate.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Awesome job, cops; glad you are out there protecting people from photographers.
Nothing we haven't seen from Hollyweird. Good work, but doesn't thrill me or speak to me. Not sure what the slit camera actually did in his work that another, more common imaging device could not do. Subterfuge it would seem from the article.
Pretty much my take too.
He may have a boat load of resolution, but until he finds a way to use it, it is largely a technical exercise.
Not more dramatic than these: http://70gigapixel.cloudapp.net/ or these http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/dresden26GP but possibly done
with cheaper methods.
Still, people have been stitching images like this for a long time with equally cheap equipment, although they can't capture motion.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Way to miss the point.
With a stationary slit-scan camera he's imaging t*Y, not X*Y.
no no, watch 42nd street. That's the magic. The photos are junk.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
In fact, I was a lot newer than I am now the first time I was involved with a slit camera, in this case a 35mm with its horizontally running window shade shutter glue in about the 1/500th second position, halfway across the frame. Focused on the mirror on the finish line post at the greyhound track somewhat north of Rapid City, SD.
The film was pulled by a variable speed motor such that the dogs, as they crossed the mirror, weren't too badly lengthened or shortened, along with a digital clock that output to LED's in binary with the leds in the upper part of the mirror on the post so that the elapsed time track was a series of dashes above the dogs in the film strip.
It ran in a darkroom so they could snip off the end of the exposed film, perhaps 9 or 10 inches long, drop it in some hot dektol, wait till the image was about right, drop it is some strong acetic acid, pull it up to look at it with a magnifying glass and post the winners blanket number and time, all in 15 to 20 seconds. The strip never was fixed unless 2 dogs were nose and nose, because it was about time for the next race to be off.
This was in the middle of the 1960's, and was by then _the_ method at racetracks all over the country, so it wasn't new then.
Links to research papers, code and more http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/
ANYBODY that can take $50 and credit it to a $500 devaluation is MY type of sucker ( shades of P. T. Barnum )
redneck geek
The website where the story article is hosted is pretty terrible. It's apparently based entirely on some sort of JavaScript hacks [...]
Maybe they were... wait for it... Hacking the Concept of JavaScript?
I've seen a few Slashdot links to this "medium" website recently. I think it hosts single pages from different authors in a format that is supposed to be comfort able to read on a tablet computer. Just my guess, I don't have a tablet that will show this type of page (just a hacked e-ink Nook running Android).
I now check where the link leads before clicking it in the fine summary as well as the comments. If it leads to "medium" I don't even follow the link anymore.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
...Heck, you could even do this in post-processing using a normal 2-D camera that's capturing a movie. Just snag a single column from successive frames and stack them into a single picture. Sure, your frame rate will be limited, but it's technically feasible, especially if the 2-D sensors allow for windowing to increase frame rate.
AFAIK this single column capture is very close to what NewTek's Digiview did on the Amiga computer and it was done that way because that was the cheapest, simplest way to digitize an NTSC/PAL frame on a slow computer which just happened to have a clock rate synchronized to the NTSC, PAL or SECAM video refresh rate.
Magyar's technique is more sophisticated but if you panned a tripod at the same rate as someone walking past a video camera during a Digiview capture, you ended up with a space/time distortion somewhere between Magyar's and the motion blur you'd get with an analogue camera. We had as much fun playing with this aspect of Digiview as we had making "proper" still digitizations which required keeping the camera and subject absolutely still while you swapped in Red, Green and Blue filters. A turned head was stretched out into a weird cylinder with hair and chin in place but ears and eyes elongated horizontally. We also found that it it was possible to create anaglyph 3D images by moving the camera horizontally during exposure.