I do a lot of amateur film photography and have always been interested in DIY projects over the years. One day when I was browsing some ideas for a pinhole camera project that uses nothing more than a matchbox and a roll of film, I stumbled upon a website that depicted a strange contraption. This bizarre apparatus turned out to be nothing more than a flatbed scanner that was converted into a camera by using the scanning sensor on it, with a built-over housing.
Aside from the obvious eerie and disturbing results that it produces, the unique part of it is the way it captures motion. Since the scanning head moves in a linear motion and records one line segment at a time, movement is captured in short linear bursts. Depending on the speed of the scan and the speed of the moving subject, the resulting photograph may either show long smoke-like stretches or very narrow (squished) line segments.
The scanner camera has even been used to capture video, and the results are genuinely spooky. The low quality also brings a chill to your spine, producing an almost security camera-like footage as if it were evidence of paranormal activity. This reminded me of the scanner principles we covered in the first lectures of this course and on the basics of how it works. It would be interesting to see further developments with this method, perhaps employing the use of color more or obtaining a sharper focus. None the less, I found the imagery to be quite provocative.
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