create fifty-two

I’m interested in odd camera designs, such as slit photo finish cameras (historically used for race finishes lines when it’s a close call). It occurred to me that I could easily make slit photo finish images by taking a video (using my Leica D-LUX digital camera) and then writing a script to process the video (by taking a vertical line of pixels from each frame of the video, and stacking them end-to-end to make a single still image).

Then it occurred to me I could go one further – because I have a choice of which vertical line of pixels to use on the video, I could use every possible vertical line of pixels to make lots of photos finish images, and put them back into a video.

Then I realised another way of thinking about what I was doing: in effect, I was rotating (or transposing) the original video’s array of pixels (for a video is actually nought but a 3D array of pixels), swapping one space dimension and the time dimension.

So I made some videos as described. The following two pictures show a frame from an input video, and one from the corresponding output video:

Input video

Output video

To see the actual input and output videos, please visit the flickr video set.

For some actual analysis and thoughts on what is happening, and what sort of effects happen in the output videos, please visit this page on the Cookbook wiki.

(Coming soon: link to the python script for generating these videos.)

Things have been a bit delayed due to holiday madness and illness and generally the world exploding…

I’ve added more things to Soup, the film development database site. In particular:

• a howto on shooting redscale film (some redscale examples at flickr)
• a development timer applet which makes noises at you – aid memoire. (To see it running, do a search and then click on a time in the results table.) Applet source is on cookbook wiki.
• added data on Microphen and HC developers to soup database

Thermalite is an aerated concrete that is used as a light, insulating building material. It’s also quite good for hacking away at to form things. All you need is a wood gouge or two (buying an old used one is a good idea – it’ll get blunt anyway), and surform tools can be useful (think grater).

View the photos at flickr.

The material I worked with here has a boring grey colour (lighter coloured variants are available) but I quite like the rough texture of it, and the air bubble holes. You can always paint your creation when you’re finished, but it doesn’t always improve it – I think the swirly biscuit thing was better unpainted…

By the by: cement dust is really, really bad for your lungs and you need to wear breathing protection if you ever do this. (Also, if you wet the surface you’re working on it prevents quite a lot of dust getting in the air.)

A bit delayed, but here is the first week’s item: Soup. It’s an online database of film development times for various film types and chemicals. Much more data can be added, plus a few useful tools I have in mind. This is defo one for further development in the future.

I’m going to create a general jumping-off page for all the items sometime soon. But not yet, patience child!