:MeetPi

Some time ago (almost a year ago, I think) I was playing with some ideas about manipulating video. My thinking was that video could be conceived as a volumetric texture. In other words, each frame of video could be stacked to create a 3D volume. Passing an arbitrary projection plane through this volume would lead to some interesting effects. Because the depth (z) dimension of this video is effectively time, an arbitrary plane of intersection would allow you to play with time and space on a 2D area (the screen). I was hoping this might allow people new sensory access into time and space, and thus allow for the development of a different appreciation of reality.
Of course, as with anything that has become programmatically trivial, this idea is not new. My favorite example of slicing video volumes is the Khronos projector project, which lets you deform a z axis-aligned projection plane interactively. Talking about some of my ideas with Mitchell revealed that his brother had also been toying with ideas about video volumes and intersection planes. Indeed, even before digital technology, photographers were playing with slit shot photography. In fact, here’s a page listing around a dozen projects that do similar things.

So anyway, the ‘Net’s nothing if not replication and redundancy, so here’s my contribution. I wrote a small program in C that runs as a command-line application to process image sequences (it does not work with video files, so you need to export them to image sequences before processing, which is a pain). The program’s pretty simple and should compile on windows, Mac or Linux assuming you’re configured the FreeImage library right. You can download an executable for PPC Mac 10.4 here, or grab the source code here (.cpp and .h – you’ll also need FreeImage). Go have a look at the full page for a more expanded description, screen shots and video examples of the process in action. It’s fairly mind bending stuff.

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As far as photography is concerned, astrophotography is a bit odd. It’s not like the heavens haven’t been images thousands of times, and often by people with equipment that far exceeds my own meagre means.

But people do continue to take shots of the sky at night. Look at this shot of the Milky Way featuring the Southern Cross, taken from my backyard one cool Autumn evening:

I took this with a Nikon d70s with a 30 second exposure. Later, I took another shot, this time with a 200 second exposure. Since I didn’t have a tripod that could track the sky’s movement, there’s some blurring of the stars here.

But you still get the idea. Now you can see the Coal Sack and the dust really clearly. So it was cold, and I had to hold the shutter button, and the result is a photo that I could easily have grabbed from the Internet. Have a look at Greg Bock’s photos, for instance. Better than mine, but basically the same thing.

So why do I still want to go out and take more photos? Partly it’s the technical challenge, for sure. But it’s also the sense you get that you have somehow captured a part of the universe – maybe hat you’ve seen that little bit further than you might otherwise have seen. There’s also a sense of tangibility for me. A photo in a book or on the ‘Net is beautiful, and may be technially superior to y attempts above, but to me my photos are more real simply because I took them.

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