Developages - Development and Technology Blog

On Wired’s How-to Wiki, they decided to try their hand at building Mike Golembewski’s Scanner Camera project, featured in MAKE Volume 14 and in the Sept 19th episode of Make: Weekend Project (see both below). Charlie Sorrel, author of the piece, did what looks like a nice job with the build, but the results look like something from a questionable episode of Ghost Hunters (if that’s not redundant).

We asked Kip Kay of Weekend Projects for any tips he can offer Charlie:

Here is what I discovered about focusing. You have to really play with the
focusing elements and the distance to the object. I got some pretty good
results as seen in the video from about 4 feet away. But the results were
nothing like what the original author, Mike Golembewski achieved. I think he
had an actual lens on his rather than a magnifying glass for the pictures in
the article. (He did mention he had built a better one)

Before taping the camera to the scanner, you should tape on a piece of
tracing paper over the back which allows you to see the image and get it
focused properly.

Wired’s How-To Wiki: Make a Scanner Camera

More:

Weekend Project: Scanner Camera

Weekend Project: Scanner Camera (PDF)

Mod a flatbed scanner to take photos that decontruct time and motion with wild results!
Thanks go to Mike Golembewski for the original article in Make Volume 14
View the PDF

Scanner cam portraits at American Maker

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Gareth Branwyn

Gijs Gieskes’ experiements with sound and light continue with the animated Strobovj synched to Gameboy LSDJ sequencer clock signal. Features include -

• The left knob sets the speed for the rotating plate.

• The strobe frequency, and the bike lamps light are set in sequence, recorded with the knob with the two push buttons below it.
• The cameras pan tilt servos, can be recorded in sequence, with the two knobs and the toggle switch below them.
• The next toggle switch sets the sequencer to 3/4 or 4/4.
• And the next toggle switch sets the sequencer to 32 or 64 or 128 steps if 4/4 is selected. Or 24 or 48 or 96 if 3/4 is selected.

Very cool - the animated camera is an unusual and welcome feature. Peter Kirn explains more over @ CDM - Stroboscope Creation Animates Sequences

More:
Phonographantasmascope

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Collin Cunningham

The LIFE photo archive hosted by Google has a ton of lovely gems, here are a few I found that I really liked - all through a “MAKE” filter…

The contents assiting the Atomic Energy chemistry set.
Location: US
Date taken: September 1948
Photographer: Martha Holmes

Science As A Party Game
Author Kenneth Swezey (L) blowing pinch of cornstarch into candle flame to show how dust carried in the air can explode & destroy factories or coal mines as fans watch this experiment fr. his new bk. AFTER-DINNER SCIENCE.
Location: US
Date taken: October 1948
Photographer: George Silk

Science Fair.
Location: Cleveland, OH, US
Date taken: March 1958
Photographer: Andreas Feininger

A woman tool maker assembling a Buffalo machine gun.
Location: US
Date taken: 1943
Photographer: Wallace Kirkland

Chair maker working in shop.
Location: Damascus, Syria
Date taken: 1943
Photographer: John Phillips

Sixth grade science teacher Mildred Vance teaching a TV class.
Location: Hagerstown, MD, US
Date taken: November 1956
Photographer: Peter Stackpole

Leaping rubber explosively created from butadiene gas in bottle as demonstrated by M.I.T.’s Dr. A. Morton.
Location: US
Date taken: 1952
Photographer: W. Eugene Smith

Jr. Science Convention
Date taken: May 05, 1950
Photographer: Bernard Hoffman

Hopkins Science Show
Date taken: February 1952
Photographer: Mark Kauffman

Students conducting experiments in chemistry class at the Montevideo Highshool.
Location: Montevideo, Uruguay
Date taken: 1941
Photographer: Hart Preston

Life like models for use in science and health lectures manufactured at Cologne Health Museum.
Location: Cologne, Germany
Date taken: February 1955
Photographer: Ralph Crane

Folk singer John Jacob Niles (R) and cabinet maker Harry Mefford giving finishing touches to a new dulcimer. It will not be ready to play until it has “hung” for two or three years.
Location: Lexington, KY, US
Date taken: March 1943
Photographer: Alfred Eisenstaedt

Pirate robot in a new Disneyland ride called “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
Location: CA, US
Date taken: 1967
Photographer: Ralph Crane

Fresno’s Sunnyside Bowl-Bowling Alley.
Location: Fresno, CA, US
Date taken: 1961
Photographer: J. R. Eyerman

Cal. Tech chemistry professor, Dr. Linus Pauling, with his mineral collection.
Location: CA, US
Date taken: 1954
Photographer: J. R. Eyerman

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Phillip Torrone

How to make water bounce from Edison’s desk. Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, GE scientists captured details of water droplets dancing on amazing superhydrophobic surfaces developed in GE Global Research’s Nanotechnology lab. Tao writes -

Hello everyone, I have some exciting videos that I want to share with you! Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, we can finally capture the details of the water dancing on these amazing superhydrophobic surfaces. We discovered that even when the surfaces had the same contact angle for stationary water droplets, their ability to resist the wetting of impacting droplets could be totally different. In the following three videos, the contact angles of a stationary droplet on all three surfaces are ~150 degree. When an impacting droplet (with the same impact speed) hits on the surfaces, the droplet can either stay on the surface.

Look at the way the water droplet spreads, recoils, breaks into satellite droplets, and completely lifts off… that’s what we really want for an impacting-droplet resistant surface! You might wonder what we can do with a cool thing like this? Imagine applications that involve high speed water droplets, such as wind turbine blade, airplane wing, or even just your car in motion. These are just a couple of the exciting possibilities that we are looking at.

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Phillip Torrone

From the MAKE Flickr photo pool

ProdMod made this charger/light combo for use with Flip cameras using just 2 AA batteries with a DC step-up circuit - double handy! - ProdMod Video Light and Charger for Flip camcorder

More:


ProdMod LED Camera Light Kit v1.1

MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v2.0

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Collin Cunningham

Via BB, Kevin Kelly writes:

This is Tanya Vlach’s new eyeball. She lost her real one in a car accident a few years ago. I met Tanya at a film festival recently. During our conversation she said she was looking for help in turning her artificial eye into a eye-cam. You know, a mini web cam inside an eyeball. It would capture live video and stream it to a memory somewhere and also perhaps eventually assist her own vision in real time. She confessed that she was not technologically adept enough to hack it on her own.

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Becky Stern

MAKE author Steve Lodefink remade one of those cool n’ fancy vapor projection screens you’ve likely seen in used for special effect video display -

If you’ve ever ridden the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, you will remember how, right before you hit the first drop, you are greeted with the ghostly image of the tentacle-faced Davey Jones creature warning you that “dead men tell no tales”. I certainly did.
[…]
I have no idea how the commercial fog screen makes those glass-smooth sheets of air, but all I could think of was to shoot the air through some drinking straws. I made a little box-jig and hot-glued up some bricks of 2 inch straw sections. I then chained those bricks together into long vents. It does straighten out the airflow quite a bit, but certainly does not produce a laminar flow.

Well, it looks pretty impressive from here! Head over to Finkbuilt to see how it’s done - DIY Fog Screen

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Collin Cunningham

Jerry shares his strategy for weather-proofing a webcam for use on his balcony. Nice video documentation - one might consider using some silicone to seal up those cable ports. You can see the results of his rig on his site.

More:
DIY $27 Outdoor Webcam Enclosure

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Collin Cunningham

At the Austin Maker Faire, Mister Jalopy was telling me about the scanner camera Stephen Miller brought and set up at last month’s American Maker event. Here’s the Flickr set of the portraits he took.

American Maker Fair Flickr set [Thanks, Mister J!]

More:

• Building a “scanner” camera
• Scanner Camera
• Weekend Project: Scanner Camera

>

• http://makezine.com/american/

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Gareth Branwyn

Matt Mets made this cat-leidoscope out of three wall mirrors from IKEA and used it to take pictures of his cat. I can’t think of a better way to spend a Monday evening.

More:

• DIY kaleidoscope
• Kaleidoscope your photos
• DIY Camera kaleidoscope
• HOW TO - Make your own kaleidoscope
• Simple Laser Kaleidoscope

From the pages of MAKE:

Recycled Kaleidoscope MAKE: 14: Optics, Page 57 - Subscribers–read this article now in your digital edition

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Becky Stern

21 of the most amazing photos you’ll ever see of the Sun @ Boston.com…

The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minumum - in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year - with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm, but are continually monitoring our closest star with an array of telescopes and satellites. Seen below are some recent images of the Sun in more active times.

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Phillip Torrone

Seen on the Make: Flickr Pool, a pinhole camera housed inside of a top hat.

Abracadabra Pinhole Camera

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Gareth Branwyn

The Best Science Images of 2008 were announced at National Geographic, the squid suckers are awesome!

Little Shop of Horrors fans may see a resemblance to the bloodthirsty plant from the 1986 movie in the above electron micrograph image.

Drexel University doctoral student Jessica Schiffman won an honorable mention in photography in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for capturing what’s actually an array of suckers found on the tentacles of a long-finned squid.

Each sucker–about 400 micrometers wide, or a little smaller than the width of a human hair–is surrounded with “fangs” of chitin, a hard organic material.

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Phillip Torrone

The guy who started Oakley is now going to kick the butts of every high end camera maker in the world, the Red Digital Cinema looks amazing! Great article about him and the gear @ Wired.

Jim Jannard, 59, is the billionaire founder of Red. In 1975 he spent $300 to make a batch of custom motocross handlebar grips, which he sold from the back of a van. He named his company Oakley, after his English setter, and eventually expanded into sci-fi-style sunglasses, bags, and shoes. In November of last year he sold the business to Luxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban, for a reported $2.1 billion.

His team of engineers and scientists have created the first digital movie camera that matches the detail and richness of analog film. The Red One records motion in a whopping 4,096 lines of horizontal resolution—”4K” in filmmaker lingo—and 2,304 of vertical. For comparison, hi-def digital movies like Sin City and the Star Wars prequels top out at 1,920 by 1,080, just like your HDTV. (There’s also a slightly higher-resolution option called 2K that reaches 2,048 lines by 1,080.) Film doesn’t have pixels, but the industry-standard 35-millimeter stock has a visual resolution roughly equivalent to 4K. And that’s what makes the Red so exciting: It delivers all the dazzle of analog, but it’s easier to use and cheaper—by orders of magnitude—than a film camera. In other words, Jannard’s creation threatens to make 35-mm movie film obsolete.

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Phillip Torrone

From the MAKE Flickr photo pool

It seems the Animal Detection Team has been conducting a bit more experimentation involving their aptly named Animal Detector imaging device -

This past week, we took the device to the beach. One afternoon we set the light aside and pointed the camera skyward, recording the motion of pelicans and seagulls flying by for a couple of hours. The birds and their wings traced such elegant paths across the sky. The multi-exposure traces below were made by importing quicktime films into ImageJ and making Z-projections of the resulting stacks.

Branching out from research/surveillance into documentarion art - nicely done.

- Traces of pelicans and seagulls crossing the sky

- Two Pelicans on Flickr

More:

Animals - caught on tape!

Read more | Permalink | Comments |

Read more articles in Imaging |

Digg this!

Original post by Collin Cunningham