LA Photographer Eric Curry’s series “American Pride and Passion” is just beautiful. Each piece is achieved using a very simple technique: The scene is staged in darkness, a camera positioned to record it, and different parts individually illuminated—say, with a flashlight—while a long exposure is recorded. The many resulting images are composited in appropriate software, and with considerable artistry, to create the glowing, ethereally-lit finished pieces.
Many of you will probably have seen this one from late August, already. I haven’t found any indication that Mr. Munroe has actually done this, yet, but there’s no reason the idea shouldn’t work, in principle. To do so requires a viewer with an individually addressable video display for each eye, but these are not too hard to come by. And large-parallax static stereograms taken using widely-separated synchronized cameras are well known.
I can’t think of a better name for a person who build pole cameras than Polster. And fortunately for Jim, that is his last name. In addition to being the proprietor of Longshot Camera Systems, Jim is also a broad spectrum maker.
Inspired by Hektor the spraycan robot and following in the footsteps of the AS220 Drawbot and Harvey Moon’s Drawing Machine, Edinburgh maker Sandy Nobel’s Polargraph puts a spin on the hanging drawing machine. Using a dual-polar coordinate system instead of the standard cartesian gives the machine its unique name and particular style.
QR Code Island is a delightfully hare-brained concept design from Mat Barnes and Eddie Blake, which will continue to delight me until news appears that someone is actually trying to build such a thing.
Sebastian Korczak hacked together a 360° rotating 3D scanner using little more than a record turntable modified with Arduino, digital camera, and a laser pointer. Korczak’s laser was mated with a special lens to create a linear beam. The distortion of this beam as it scanned the room coupled with the video data is put into a Python script, which outputs a point cloud of whatever is scanned. In this manner he is able to get full real-time scans of entire rooms. Fortunately for us, he’s provided extensive documentation on his homepage.
As impressive as this bottle-cap self-portrait from artist Mary Ellen Croteau may be, I probably would not have chosen to mention her piece “CLOSE,” here, if it weren’t for the interesting way that she has used sets of nested plastic bottle caps and bottle-cap liners to achieve a much deeper color palette than would’ve been possible using bottle caps without the nesting trick. Clever!
