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.)

I wanted to start on a software tool for playing with typography (text) in a casual, bullying sort of way. Hence this typography toy, which I have stopped fiddling with now…

There’s a set on flickr of random pics I made with it. It’s more fun to play with it than look at the results, though…

It’s written in Processing again. It’s downloadable via the following links:

• Windows: download (approx 300K. Java must be installed on your system.)
• Mac OS X (and possibly earlier versions): download (approx 300K)
• Linux: download (approx 300K)

The Processing source code is included with each download. If you download it, please read the readme.txt file – or else you’ll probably just scratch your head and go “whaaaa?” before resorting to a life of crime….

Again I’m reminded that Processing isn’t the most natural seeming choice for software where you need some sort of complex interface: it doesn’t seem to come with the ability to add buttons etc. to your UI (although you can implement them yourself – doh!) – hence the large amount of key presses possible to control this thing. Of course, with some effort, a nicer interface is well possible…

“Typography” probably isn’t an accurate word for what this thing is – but somewhere a man is being eaten by a gruffalo, and that is much more important, don’t you think?

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