{"id":232,"date":"2008-01-02T07:27:13","date_gmt":"2008-01-02T07:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/?p=232"},"modified":"2026-01-01T22:54:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T22:54:14","slug":"photosworl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/?p=232","title":{"rendered":"PhotoSworl or slitscan photography"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Real objects spun through time. Photos are made by taking thousands of pictures of a slowly rotating object, cropping the same single horisontal line of pixels from each photo then stacking each line on top of the other to produce a new picture. The finished pictures look real, with shadows and organic detail, yet improbably thin and distorted. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developed over several weeks, I built a gear system from Lego to step down a motor by ~100:1 to get the turn table rotating slowly enough. Used a laptop to take time-lapse pictures of the objects on the turn table, one every 5 seconds. Had to build an external power supply for a Cannon 400D, an elastic tension system for the turntable to prevent judder. Had to use a large and very hot, red headlight to get enough light on the scene to allow a low ISO (low noise) picture with a fast enough shutter speed to photo the continually moving object without blur. Had to commandeer the bathroom for a week to get a sealed room and prevent external light from varying the exposure on successive photos.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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Tried several different objects, flowers work really well (but wilt after an hour under the lights), a banana and an apple look like twisted fruit. A piece of drusy quartz worked well, even capturing the crystals sparkling as they went around.
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Used Imagemagik and a powershell script to crop all ~4000 images and stack the single lines into the finished image.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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Some more swirls with the original objects for comparison <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here’s a video created by moving the chosen horisontal line down through the image, one line per frame. creates a strangely compelling but weirdly warped image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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