Use your camera to create slit camera (slit-scan or timeline) images.

My first attempt:

What a great idea. I think the result is interesting, very abstract. As an art student I have been looking for ways to incorporate photography into painting. I'm going to download this and give it a try.

wowwww....I can't imagine the work that must have gone into this....good job and great shot!!!

I'll definitely try this myself!

Incredibly wicked!

I can't get my head around how it's done, and that's after reading your site and wiki....

You can tell which direction the cars are going by their shadow. But the bonnet (hood) of the car goes past the "slit" first whether the car is going left or right on the road.

Interesting. Could you give us a little more detail because I can't figure out what you've done nor what the term "slit" means.

jra wrote in post #15313621
Interesting. Could you give us a little more detail because I can't figure out what you've done nor what the term "slit" means.

Hopefully www.slitcam.com explains - if not I do appreciate any comments that would enable me to improve it.

A real physical slit camera is an old idea used for photo finish recording and some landscape stuff.

Instead of the film/sensor being exposed to a whole image only a thin line (masked through a fine slit) is exposed while, in the case of film, the film is wound past the slit for a period of time.

A flatbed scanner (or even photocopier) works in much the same way - the sensor is long and thin and is dragged along the paper being scanned - you can often see the image being built up on tour PC screen as it scans.

What I did was to use my DSLR to get raw data as a video file then chop out one column (or row) of pixels from each video frame and stick these together in time sequence.

this can be done with magic lantern

calypsob wrote in post #15322887
this can be done with magic lantern

I didn't know that.

I'd like to know more.

I have not used Magic Lantern - is it easy/safe? It looks a bit scary!

A quick look at the site and I can find references to slit-scan but haven't managed to spot how you can do this or other details. Have you done it? How?

What resolution and frame rate can be used? Is it via video or?

My program has the advantage of not touching the camera, and can use any video (converted to .mov file if necessary) for input.

I have Magic Lantern, and spent a few minutes trying to figure out the slit-scan feature and got nothing out of it.

Your solution looks much more usable. Nice work. I just wish we had a high frame rate solution so we could use them for bike races like a finishlynx

Martin Dixon wrote in post #15313453
You can tell which direction the cars are going by their shadow.

You can?

Martin Dixon wrote in post #15323889
I didn't know that.

I'd like to know more.

I have not used Magic Lantern - is it easy/safe? It looks a bit scary!

A quick look at the site and I can find references to slit-scan but haven't managed to spot how you can do this or other details. Have you done it? How?

What resolution and frame rate can be used? Is it via video or?

My program has the advantage of not touching the camera, and can use any video (converted to .mov file if necessary) for input.

Honestly I have never tried using the slit scan function but I have seen images created with it and they are impressive. The magic lantern forum is a great place for asking questions about the firmware. Download it and read the manual. It is very extensive and explains every feature. I use magic lantern on both of my memory cards and I love it. I have never known of an incident were it actually caused a camera to fail but if you take out your memory card before it is finished writing an image the camera will lock up until you pull out the battery. I have never had any problems with magic lantern and it turns your camera into a super camera. http://vimeo.com …iclantern/video​s/19654126

moose10101 wrote in post #15325243
You can?

Yeah, look at the shadows off the bus and the Mini Cooper behind it, compared to all the shadows in the near lane traveling the other direction.

Keep in mind that these images show a history. You're looking back in time, not at a moment in time. In this case, you're looking at a single plane through space, and an area of time, rather than a single time with a area of space. The shadows are moving and will stack up in different directions in this history based on which direction they were traveling.

If that bus backed up through the slit, you would see the bus look the same (assuming constant speed), but the shadow would change because it's arriving at the slit at a different time relative to the bus.

Both of the examples shown here seem to be horizontal scans, whereas the images I most associate with slit-scan are vertical scans like the old auto racing shots where the wheels look elliptical. Really, it's about the movement of the slit relative to the movement of the objects. If they are in the same plane, you just get compression or stretching. If they are in different planes, you get skewing which is (to me) more traditional.

For this reason, the shadows in the first picture don't actually show the direction of motion. They are merely compressed versions of the actual shadows.

For the bike race, the horizontal scan makes sense because it magnifies the wheel position.

EDIT: wait a sec, that's not entirely right. I might need to read up on this particular slit-scan a bit more.

^^^Yeah, in the first image up top, the wheels could be perfectly round if there was a faster video frame rate. There just aren't columns of pixels at a high enough resolution to represent it. (I'm assuming that all available columns are shown in that image though...)

I love looking at a bike throw in a slit-scan image. The winner often appears to be on a longer bike because he or she timed the throw to maximize as the front wheel hits the line, then they pull the bike back under them as it crosses the line, which slows the speed of the bike and gives it more columns of pixels for the final image. For the same reason, they look to have really long forearms because they move with the bike, but their torso and hips are going a more constant speed in spite of the throw, so they don't get longer.