Its a great idea, I think they should read the papers on dithering (I've got a color e-paper display and you can get a lot less noise than that by better dithering). The interesting thing is that back in the film days you took your 12 pictures and sent them off to the lab, and two or three days later you found out if any of them were great. This gives some of that "wait for it" kind of feel back to the photography. And at least for me, I think longer about taking a shot if I won't know instantly if its good or not :-)
Great work! About two hours ago, I was listening to "Générique" by Miles Davis (jazz) with a noisy, animated gradient background. The whole experience felt incredibly immersive. Now, this camera can bring that beautiful noise texture into photos with a single click. Add some clever motion graphics and transform those photos into illustrative noisy textured gradients, it could become an amazing music visualizer for jazz lovers. I don't know why, but I'm really obsessed with noisy textures.
As a curiosity, "Générique" is not a name for a song. "Générique" is the word used in French for the music that plays over the intro opening credits of a movie or TV show episode.
Very cute idea. I would expect that with a 15 second develop time and no live display preview some kind of optical viewfinder would be very helpful. I love seeing weird cameras.
cute. I'd like to see some photos without the dithering applied, as it looks similar to a regular dithered jpeg, like you'd see on
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
it would be fun to try out a few different algos for the colour space conversion.
Restriction is a widely used technique in both art, and life. Consider black and white paintings, or generally paintings which only use shades of a single color? Why are they not using all the colors when they exist?
What about people who do challenging athletic endeavors with limitations? The ice guy climbed up to the base camp of Everest in just his shorts and slippers. Why not wear more?
What about minimalism as a way of life? Why not buy more if you have money?
When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone.
His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worrying so much about fidelity probably gave him more time to concentrate on the lyrics and music.
Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?
You don’t deserve the downvotes for what is a wholly reasonable and not unusual question.
Art really demands constraints, simplicity is clarifying, ephemerality is provocative, and designing your own creative tools invites metacognition. Doing all of this with a highly capable computing device is fascinating, IMO: it’s hypothetical, alternative future stuff. This device is an art experiment, isn’t it?
I have a (still modestly expensive) full frame digital camera that I bought specifically for the purpose of using alternative lens techniques: a home-made tilt shift bellows, wide angle pinhole, vintage lenses, enlarger lenses, and my own simple adaptations of binocular eyepieces and simple achromats, which have an “early photography” vibe, not least because to design them I ended up reading about Daguerre, Chevalier and Wollaston. They have changed my perspective on photography.
There is IMO very little in the way of artistic inspiration to be found at the cutting edge unless you are going to at least partly subvert cutting edge tools to do things they weren’t designed for. So it follows that creative technology is likely to be something of a dialogue with transformation and limitation.
One positive aspect of a camera like this is that it forces you to slow down. Because you can’t take 10 frames per second hoping to get some keepers, you become more intentional when shooting. I took a photography class where we were asked to cover the LCDs with cardboard, so that you couldn’t get an immediate feedback and slow down a bit. Another trick is to format memory cards so that they can only store a few exposures. Going slow sometimes is a good thing.
It seems to be playing on Nostalgia, judging by these paragraphs like this one:
>The dithered photos look somewhere between a newspaper halftone and an old video game. The processing is part of the fun: you watch the colors come in one by one, like a digital polaroid.
Frankly, it does seem like a very fun gimmick, but also highly impractical. But my adoration of this little thing might just come from a general longing of the low-tech, simple devices of the past.
There is a good amount of articles of how we worked towards one device for everything, and more are rediscovering single use devices.
One use case is it helps kids understand how things work, including using dvds, etc.
A low fidelity photo allows the imagination to fill in the picture. Insistent kids can relate to lower fidelity as their own writing and drawing evolves.
> With ePaper, the photo on screen stays there even after powering off.
> The only way to clear the screen is to take a new photo.
>
> Source: https://reframe.camera
Thank you... dear developers, artists, people... for the marvel, art you do...
A color eink screen is a wonderful recalibration for a screen that kids can use compared to the overstimulation of an lcd, especially with touchscreen features.
Its a great idea, I think they should read the papers on dithering (I've got a color e-paper display and you can get a lot less noise than that by better dithering). The interesting thing is that back in the film days you took your 12 pictures and sent them off to the lab, and two or three days later you found out if any of them were great. This gives some of that "wait for it" kind of feel back to the photography. And at least for me, I think longer about taking a shot if I won't know instantly if its good or not :-)
It would be useful to include battery consumption and thermal performance during long recording sessions.
Practicality aside, I really love this concept
Great work! About two hours ago, I was listening to "Générique" by Miles Davis (jazz) with a noisy, animated gradient background. The whole experience felt incredibly immersive. Now, this camera can bring that beautiful noise texture into photos with a single click. Add some clever motion graphics and transform those photos into illustrative noisy textured gradients, it could become an amazing music visualizer for jazz lovers. I don't know why, but I'm really obsessed with noisy textures.
Générique by Miles Davis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q73OSYyq5E0
Immersive noisy background: https://monopo.vn/
(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way. I just came across it on the Awwwards website: https://www.awwwards.com/inspiration/monopo-saigon-hypnotic-...)
As a curiosity, "Générique" is not a name for a song. "Générique" is the word used in French for the music that plays over the intro opening credits of a movie or TV show episode.
In this case, this would be the song that plays over the intro credits of "Ascenseur Pour l'Echaffaud" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051378/).
(Ie. Miles Davis might have several pieces of music all titled 'générique', for the various movies or shows where he contributed on soundtracks)
Very cute idea. I would expect that with a 15 second develop time and no live display preview some kind of optical viewfinder would be very helpful. I love seeing weird cameras.
Considering there are attempts to increase the frame rate on epaper screens, it would be interesting to see if that is possible with this.
Reminds me of photos in games about 30 years ago…
cute. I'd like to see some photos without the dithering applied, as it looks similar to a regular dithered jpeg, like you'd see on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
it would be fun to try out a few different algos for the colour space conversion.
Thanks for that website link, I really like dithered aesthetics. I will convert my entire photos into dithers. Thank you so much again.
ove the constraints—15 seconds to develop and one photo at a time makes it feel like a digital Polaroid. Great that it’s open source, too.
I don't fully understand the obsession with making less-capable devices and talking about them as though being less capable is a feature by itself.
Restriction is a widely used technique in both art, and life. Consider black and white paintings, or generally paintings which only use shades of a single color? Why are they not using all the colors when they exist?
What about people who do challenging athletic endeavors with limitations? The ice guy climbed up to the base camp of Everest in just his shorts and slippers. Why not wear more?
What about minimalism as a way of life? Why not buy more if you have money?
This is just how humans are.
When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone.
His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worrying so much about fidelity probably gave him more time to concentrate on the lyrics and music.
Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?
You don’t deserve the downvotes for what is a wholly reasonable and not unusual question.
Art really demands constraints, simplicity is clarifying, ephemerality is provocative, and designing your own creative tools invites metacognition. Doing all of this with a highly capable computing device is fascinating, IMO: it’s hypothetical, alternative future stuff. This device is an art experiment, isn’t it?
I have a (still modestly expensive) full frame digital camera that I bought specifically for the purpose of using alternative lens techniques: a home-made tilt shift bellows, wide angle pinhole, vintage lenses, enlarger lenses, and my own simple adaptations of binocular eyepieces and simple achromats, which have an “early photography” vibe, not least because to design them I ended up reading about Daguerre, Chevalier and Wollaston. They have changed my perspective on photography.
There is IMO very little in the way of artistic inspiration to be found at the cutting edge unless you are going to at least partly subvert cutting edge tools to do things they weren’t designed for. So it follows that creative technology is likely to be something of a dialogue with transformation and limitation.
One positive aspect of a camera like this is that it forces you to slow down. Because you can’t take 10 frames per second hoping to get some keepers, you become more intentional when shooting. I took a photography class where we were asked to cover the LCDs with cardboard, so that you couldn’t get an immediate feedback and slow down a bit. Another trick is to format memory cards so that they can only store a few exposures. Going slow sometimes is a good thing.
These days you can flip the LCD facing inwards so it kinda feels like a film camera being viewfinder only.
It seems to be playing on Nostalgia, judging by these paragraphs like this one:
>The dithered photos look somewhere between a newspaper halftone and an old video game. The processing is part of the fun: you watch the colors come in one by one, like a digital polaroid.
Frankly, it does seem like a very fun gimmick, but also highly impractical. But my adoration of this little thing might just come from a general longing of the low-tech, simple devices of the past.
Cameras are both gadgets and instruments of artistic impression, if you only measure them quantitatively you miss a lot.
These cameras can be fun the same way a toy piano might be fun to a virtuoso pianist. Something different.
Something doesn’t have to be for everyone.
There is a good amount of articles of how we worked towards one device for everything, and more are rediscovering single use devices.
One use case is it helps kids understand how things work, including using dvds, etc.
A low fidelity photo allows the imagination to fill in the picture. Insistent kids can relate to lower fidelity as their own writing and drawing evolves.
Very cool! Any idea what the approximate battery life on this is?
This dithering could also be an interesting variation: https://dead.garden/blog/how-my-images-are-dithered.html
(Featured few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006096)
A color eink screen is a wonderful recalibration for a screen that kids can use compared to the overstimulation of an lcd, especially with touchscreen features.
So is the goal to make ewaste now?
What is the point?
Make hay while the sun shines.