Linear Strip Images

This technique involves recording of many "slices" of time into a single image. Unlike traditional photography where a single image is taken, and it shows a single moment in time, this takes the equivalent of lots of little photographs, each of which are just a single vertical stripe.

First, I sat in my spinny-rolly chair, and just slowly rotated around, while the stationary camera recorded the center vertical column of pixels out to a file, and we got this:


Then I tried this:

First, I was moving the mountain dew bottle to the right in front of the camera, then to the left, in front of the camera, cap first. Since what you are looking at is a single vertical stripe through time, rather than photographs where the entire image is of a single moment of time, you see the effect. In both cases, first the cap went in front of the recording stripe, then the label, then the bottom. The only difference is that the label is a mirror image in one of the directions. I noticed this while recording the above, so I rotated the bottle, and did this one which emphasizes this point:

I moved the bottle to the right, then back to the left in front of the scanning strip.



Okay, so, I found a DV tape in my office, and checked out what was on it, to find that it has the night of go-karting before a friend's wedding, as well as the lunch from the day afterwards. I was watching the go karting, and thought "hmm. i wonder what it would look like if i were to run this through the strip photo snagger...


First of all, this is what the tool looks like. The green line is the column of pixels that are saved out.

The next four images were captured using this camera shot. The cars came around the back corner from the left, then slowly drove across the image, back to the left.


click for freaky strange larger images


Here's another shot. It's further away, so the cars look smaller.

Notice how in the next image, the far cars as well as the closer ones are both facing in the same direction... they're the same cars at different points in time. Neat.

click for freaky strange larger image


click for freaky strange larger images
Here are two shots of water lapping. The camera was stationary in these as well. On the larger versions, you can see where I zoomed in or out.


And a quick pan around the table at lunch, showing Rob, Gil, Astrida, and Airwick (somewhat)



I modified the program to move the scanning line across the frame, instead of being stationary, which had these results:


click for freaky strange larger images


If you look closely at the second one, you will notice the same cars on the far side and the near side, both facing to the left, since the nose of the car passed in front of the scanning line first in both cases. (This is zoomed in and stretched out in the third image so that you can see what I mean.




Additional stuff..

the hallway near my office (handheld camera, rotating chair)


my office (handheld camera, rotating chair)

Processing Sketch I used for some of this.




Links
Jason Babcock - wrote the initial version of the software (in Objective C, before I wrote my Processing version)
Andrew Davidhazy - does this (and many other cool things) with traditional analog film.