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scanner camera
I was reading a book my daughter gave me for my birthday that was an overview of the different things being done in photography today. One of the things it mentioned was using a scanner as a camera. This caused my two remaining brain cells to arc out and create an epiphany. To back up a little, I've used my scanner as a camera before, but in it's manufactured mode. I just laid things on it. You can see how I started out here and here. That was over four years ago. I did a number of other scanner photographs and even sold a couple for a Nike website. But, lacking a proper photo printer, I stopped. (The proper photo printer should be here by the end of the year.) Aside from being able to make tiny things large, the scanner does some very interesting things with time.
The sensors of a digital camer cover the entire picture and are all exposed at the same time. A scanner is different. There is only one row of sensors and they move across the image recording as they go. The scanner photograph above took about 15 seconds. As the row of sensors moved, I would follow it and the stop and the rotate the pens and stop. It does interesting things.
This picture is from a family portrait series I did on a Father's Day four years ago. My son Robby played with time. It was about a 15 second exposure. He was looking one way and, when the sensor bar had passed one eye, then looked the other way. He was also smiling and the stopped smiling but didn't time that well enought. You can see the effect on the left corner of his mouth. Now, the epiphany, caused by those two arcing brain cells, was taking the scanner and using to to take pictures of outdoor scenes. You can buy scanner backs for view cameras but they are very expensive and only cover about 3x4 inches. They operate on the same principle of a desktop scanner. There is a row of sensors that travel across the image. This makes them more suitable for studio work where nothing moves but some are used for landscape and architectural photography. But what caused my brain cells to arc was 1.) I will be upgrading my Epson 2450 scanner soon and I haven't figured out what to do with it and 2.) I remembered a post where a desktop scanner was used like a camera.
Michael Golembewski's Magic Lantern
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Unfortunately, the link to the scanner project no longer works but, with the miracle of Google, I found it's new location:
The Scanner Photography Project
Building homemade digital cameras from low-end flatbed scanners.
Making new kinds of cameras to see the world in a new way...
That's a picture of how Golembewski attached a desktop scanner to the back of a 4x5 view camera. He has all sorts of good information on how to do it as well as some interesting pictures playing with time. Now, all I need is another project that I don't have the time or money to complete, but my monkey mind forges on. [As an aside, My 4x5 Polaroid conversion project is waiting for me to install the ground glass into the film holder. When time permits...] Golembewski's setup uses something less than 4x5 inches of an 8 1/2 x 11 scanner. My thought was to use all of the scanner.
This is what my Epson 2450 looks like. This is actually from an eBay auction where the scanner went for $81. They can be had for cheap.
This is a Russian FKD 18x24cm view camera. Just a tad smaller than 8x10 inches.
This one is on eBay for $146, with lens, plus $60 shipping to the US. It is meant to use glass plates but could be modified to attach the Epson scanner on the back, after making modifications per Golembewski. It would need a long extension cord or...
...a little generator ($800) and a laptop (Dell has one for $450) for capturing the images. If you adjust the scan resolution of the Epson 2450 to 600 pixels per inch it would print out a 16x20 image at 300 pixels per inch. The Epson 2450 will scan up to 2400 pixels per inch. It could be an interesting project. If you have the money and time.
scanner camera images
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hope
Reader Marja-Leena sent me this link. Maybe there is hope. Maybe people are finally waking up.
Chomsky's vindication
As political alienation grows, America’s most famous dissident finds the mainstream is coming to him
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At the age of 77, after decades as one of the world’s most widely recognized and controversial critics of American government, Noam Chomsky is still occasionally taken aback by the politics of his country. For more than 30 years, he has tracked the steady and dramatic shift to the right in the attitudes and actions of America’s leadership, a trend that, as he recently told the Georgia Straight in an extended interview, began as a predictable reaction in the early ’70s to the preceding decade’s wave of activism. Still, he admits, “I didn’t think it would go this far.”
Six presidents have come and gone since the renowned dissident and MIT linguistics pioneer published his first political work, American Power and the New Mandarins, in 1969. Yet the administration now governing surely counts as the most brazenly autocratic in that period. During their two terms, George W. Bush and his cohorts have taken virtually every step open to them to confine the powers of government to the Oval Office and its small coterie of appointed advisors. The result has undermined fundamental civil and human rights through such groundbreaking concepts as the USA PATRIOT Act and the suspension of habeas corpus. And all of it has served as scaffolding for a grimly innovative doctrine of unilateral military action that, as Chomsky argues in his latest book, Failed States, has radically weakened the fabric of international relations.
And yet, at the same time, Chomsky senses a growing openness in public political discussions that runs directly counter to this strong rightward current.
“I can see it in my own personal experience,” he says on the line from his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Last night I gave a talk, and the topics that I now discuss I could barely mention 10 or 20 years ago. It happened that this talk was on the Middle East, and I’d given another one a couple of days earlier. There were huge crowds. I was saying things that I couldn’t say in the past. When I talked about these topics even a few years ago, even in a place like Cambridge, Massachusetts, the ‘Athens of America’, there had to be police protection, literally, because the meetings were being broken up and there were threats of terror. But now it’s just totally gone—I talk freely and engage people. And the same is true all over the country.”
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despair
The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.
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The probability of another war in the Middle East is high. Only time will tell if the horrors of further warfare is to fully materialize. Even then, the shape of a war is still undecided in terms of its outcome.
If war is to be waged or not against Iran and Syria, there is still the undeniable build-up and development of measures that confirm a process of military deployment and preparation for war.
The diplomatic forum also seems to be pointing to the possibility of war. The decisions being made, the preparations being taken, and the military maneuvers that are unfolding on the geo-strategic chessboard are projecting a prognosis and forecast towards the direction of mobilization for some form of conflict in the Middle East.
In this context, people do not always realize that a war is never planned, executed or even anticipated in a matter of weeks. Military operations take months and even years to prepare. A classical example is Operation Overlord (popularly identified as “D-Day”), which resulted in the Battle of Normandy and the invasion of France. Operation Overlord took place on June 6, 1944, but the preparations for the military operation took eighteen months, “officially,” to set the stage for the invasion of the French coast. It was during a meeting in Casablanca, Morocco in January, 1943 that the U.S. President, F.D. Roosevelt, and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, outlined a strategy to invade Normandy.
With regard to Iraq, the “Downing Street memo” confirms that the decision to go to war in 2003 was decided in 2002 by the United States and Britain, and thus the preparations for war with Iraq were in reality started in 2002, a year before the invasion. The preparations for the invasion of Iraq took place at least a entire year to arrange.
The period from 1991 to 2003 has seen continuous military operations against Iraq by the Anglo-American alliance. This period that has lasted for over a decade saw stages of heavy bombardment and major air strikes on a crippled Iraqi republic and its citizens. In reality the conditions for the groundwork and preparations of the invasion and eventual occupation of Iraq took over ten years to materialize. Iraq was weakened and its strength diluted within these ten years.
Even prior to this decade of Anglo-American bombardment and U.N. sanctions, Iraq was caught in an eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s. The war between Iran and Iraq was also fuelled and organized by the United States to weaken both. In retrospect the manipulation of a war between Iran and Iraq to weaken both states seems to be strategic planning in preparation for future military operations against them. In this time preparations were also being made by securing the Balkans for future Anglo-American operations. The Balkans is adjacent to the Middle East and is also a geographic extension of the region. Preparations were made by expanding NATO, shifting military bases eastward, and securing energy routes. Dismantling the state of Yugoslavia was also a part of this objective. Yugoslavia was the regional power of the Balkans and Southeast Europe. This was done through close coordination between the Anglo-American alliance and NATO. Now all eyes are on Iran and Syria. Will there be another Anglo-American initiated war in the Middle East?
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This is a long piece. It's about connecting the dots. Dots that are there for all to see. It just takes someone to add it all up. I don't like the answer. Read this and pass it around. I hope we all make it through October.
insanity
My sister sent this video to Zoe. I wonder why she didn't send it to me? Go to Zoe's and watch it to the end.
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Mad brought this to my attention and and it is priceless! Warning, it shows sex toys in a shop, but the obscenity is not really obvious -- nay, it's the views of our representatives in the House!!!
[..and, listen closely for the punch line from Molly at the end of the tape...!]
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trying to keep up
It's been hard keeping up lately. Colin Jago was complaining about being emotionally and physically exhausted and not having the energy for photography. His wife is going through chemo. While I'm not dealing with a life threating situation, dealing with Gerry's Alzheimer's and helping keep Zoe going as she tries to cope with watching her mother continually deteriorate, can be exhausting. We visited Gerry early in the week. Always a hard day and that doesn't include the over 5 hours of driving round trip. I made some squash souffle (Zoe's family calls it "squish") for Gerry (from her recipe) and we took it down for her. It's been harder on Zoe.
I must admit that the stress hasn't been all negative. It looks like I have three new customers for websites. They just need to write checks and get started. And another customer, with two sites, that finally got it together for me to finish big changes on both of them. This is good.
Another thing not good is that William, my son-in-law, leaves for his second tour in Iraq Sunday. We found out today that he will be in a camp next to Sadr City in Baghdad. It looks like he will be part of this:
Battle for Baghdad ‘a critical point’ in the war
For U.S. military, victory in the capital means victory in the war
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The Iraq war could be heading to its decisive moment: a battle for the capital of Baghdad that already has turned dramatically bloodier for American soldiers and carries enormous stakes for the country’s future.
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At least he won't be as exposed as many. He is a sergeant now and will be the driver for his commander which means he won't be driving outside of the camp without a whole lot of other soldiers around them. And I'm sure the commander's vehicle is well armoured. But, however you look at it, it's totally fucked. And Katie, my other daughter, has a best friend with a husband that was supposed to be coming back from his second tour in Iraq but is being kept over. Short posting today. Maybe more this weekend. Maybe not.
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