eyecrusty – Experimental Capture • Fall 2022

Final Project- Holiday Inn 3D

For my final project, I really wanted to subvert the way that I think of history. The way I envision environments or events of the past is mostly through 2D planes – through flat photos and videos. I wanted to use this project as a tool to help me view older spaces in a more dynamic way. I was inspired by Claire Hentschker’s Merch Mulch piece. After viewing her work, I had taken an interest to photogrammetry through archived footage, however I also really wanted to see what an old space would look like if it still had people existing within it.

While searching through archives, I found a giant stash of vintage postcards by Holiday Inn – each with almost the exact same hotel layout, but all from different physical locations. I thought that it would be interesting to use the multiple angles these postcards provide to create one “general” 3D Holiday Inn through photogrammetry. However, all of the images were too low in quality and didn’t match up well enough to get a good scan.

But I luckily just happened to stumble upon a video of someone flying a drone over an abandoned Holiday Inn. I decided that this footage – since it was much better quality than anything else I had gathered- would be the source I would use to recreate the inn.

Using ffmpeg, COLMAP, and Meshlab I was able to create an overall environment that resembles an older Holiday Inn (thankfully the loss of detail during the photogrammetry process smoothed over the modern-day, destruction as an added bonus). I was still very interested in not only making the space 3D, but the people as well. I was able to do this by taking people out of the postcards and extracting their form with PIFuHD. Because of the poor quality, some people came out unrecognizable, but I kept them in anyways.

Right now, the environment just exists as a space, but I hope that later I can somehow make it interactive (either the camera moves or the people within the space) and add more elements like old signage.

Final Project Proposal

For my final project, I am really interested in making my second project (the one of the veins) interactive. I am thinking of using Touch Designer and and Infrared camera to be able to isolate and track someone’s veins as they stand in front of a screen. I am unsure if I want the final projection to be just of someone’s veins, or of their veins layered on top of their reflection.

Person in Time

For this project, I captured and isolated the movement of veins within the body. I was initially inspired by the Visible Human Project along with infrared photography due to the shared ability to capture what is hidden beneath our skin. And as someone who has a very turbulent relationship with their skin (I used to have a tendency to compulsively pick at it out of habit), I was also pretty keen on figuring out if there was a way I could somehow magically make this whole, giant organ suddenly disappear.

For person in time, I want to strip away a part of myself that I am constantly aware of and very accustomed to seeing, feeling, smelling everyday. When it is absent, will I still be able to recognize myself in the presented image?

Ideally, this portrait would have been a capture of only one person’s veins, but due to the difficulty of working with infrared technology, the end result consisted of veins from 2-3 people. Some people had prominent veins in certain areas/appendages and lacked them in others, so creating a collage of everyone’s most visible sections worked best.

I first captured veins under the skin using a camera with an infrared filter along with an infrared light. Once that was all done, I had to focus on extracting these veins from the footage. I initially played around with different methods of doing so (in After Effects and by using Ridge Filters and Adaptive Thresholding with python) and settled on a pipeline that implemented them both. I put individual stills from the footage (shout-out to miniverse for helping me figure out how to isolate and convert individual frames of my video footage) through a script which used ridge filters to detect and isolate any vessel-like structures. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdhn5_gT1wY). I took the sato filtered image sequences and compiled them again into an After Effects composition. That is where I collaged together the animated body.

From a traditional standpoint, collaging body parts and making it look like one cohesive body is a hard thing to do, and especially when you want the body to be moving. Different attributes visually present itself on skin (like textures and colors of skin, mannerisms in particular movements, amount of hair, etc) that can allow the viewer to easily distinguish what parts belong to who. I now really want to see if viewers can still tell which part of the body belongs to different people when provided this portrait lacking the appendages we are used to seeing.

Two Cuts

Cut one: Setting up the claw machine and displaying the prize.

Cut two: The footage captured from multiple cameras of the participants’ facial expressions.

Person In Time Proposal

My dad once mentioned to me that he used to tell people their fortunes by reading their palms. Ever since, I had been intrigued by the shapes and patterns I could find on and under people’s hands.

For my Person in Time project, I want to capture similarities between the forms created by lines in the hands and the organic compositions of trees. I am thinking of taking pictures of people’s hands using both a regular DSLR and Near-Infrared Imaging techniques. The DSLR will capture the contours and lines in someone’s hands and I will use those to form trunks of “trees”. The Near-Infrared Images will allow me to capture people’s veins. I will create branches for these trees by separating and collaging these formations. My hopes are to gather enough sets of images to create a whole entire “forest” of these trees.

I’d either present them all as one image, or as a dizzying video which starts slow and later moves faster and faster through the forest (like at 0:25 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eBl7U64_XE).

eyecrusty – The Claw

Throughout my childhood the one thing that I had always loved was the arcade. I remember it with a great fondness – how the bright lights, speedy energy, and overall environment always seemed to bring out the excitement in everyone, no matter child or adult. I sought solace in this space and its positive aura. I would always be grinning from ear to ear as I skipped from one side of the arcade to another, playing game after game. I was happy. I was calm. I was content.

But at one point in the night I would always reach one game in particular. A game that made my blood boil; a game that was relentless. It was the bane of my existence, my Achilles heel – the dreaded claw machine.

Losing to The Claw machine | It came as a shock for them to … | Flickr

Growing up and never winning a prize at said game has probably manifested into this all-consuming need I have to see others experience a similar suffering. I initially planned to collect facial expressions that convey the emotion of frustration by recording people the moment the item they are trying to win during a claw machine game slips out of the claw. However, this idea soon evolved into capturing visualizations of a much more weighted reaction – the general feeling of loss. While the game is simple and lighthearted in nature, I feel like these specific, fleeting moments have a much deeper insinuation to them.

Unexpectedly, the limitations of the toy claw machine (i.e. each round only lasting 60 seconds) that I used granted me the ability to diversify my capture by not only being able to record reactions to loss – but different kinds of it.

I split my data collection into two parts – reactions to the loss of time and reactions to the loss of an object (in this instance – the paper balls). I used three cameras – a GoPro, a Z Cam, and a Nikon DSLR- all pointed at the subject from different angles and distances to record them playing. Each person recorded was given three coins, which each grants them a minute of play time. They had to collect three balls of paper in a single round to win a prize (a mini pack of M&Ms). The final video consists of four parts – the intro, the control group (footage of how people look when just navigating the claw around), the captures of the loss of time, and the captures of the loss of an object.

(I also placed a trick ball inside of the machine – which is piece of tape that I stuck to the floor – to make the game even more confusing for some!)

My setup looked like this:

Go-Pro mounted on claw machine, Z-Camera placed in front of subject.

I was mostly inspired by two pieces of work. Conceptually, I was really interested in Shooter (2000) by Beate Geissler & Oliver Sann because I thought the idea of capturing a particular moment in time when emotions and concentration are equally at their highest is very intriguing. In terms of putting the footage together, I was really inspired by how Ray and Charles Eames approached displaying a typology through a montaged film like in Tops (1969). I used the actual audio that the claw machine itself emits as the backing track and since the tempo of the claw machine changed as players progressed through it, the footage also needed to be paced accordingly. This format was the easiest to sculpt that timing and narrative.

If I could do this over again, I would make sure that every participant is seated in the same position for each take and that I stabilize the lighting so there are less inconsistencies in the overall composition, but I am overall pretty content with the end result!

**Content Warning: Profanity/Swearing**

Typology Proposal

Growing up the one thing that I always loved doing was going to arcades. It brought out the excitement and giddiness of everyone. However, on top of all of this excitement there was always one other constant – the pure anger I would see brought out by the dreaded claw machine.

I am hoping to capture visualizations of human frustration. I am planning to collect a series of videos that capture claw machine players’ faces/emotions the second that the item they are trying to win slips out of the machine’s claw. In order to have accurate results and to see the exact moment their emotions switch, I would use a slow motion camera to film their faces. If we have more than one available, I can also record the claw in slow motion to sync up the cameras and make sure the timing is more exact. The final result would be a series of videos (that I would like to present in a similar manner as Tops (1969) by Ray and Charles Eames) or before/after images of the participants.

I reached out to the Dave and Busters in Pittsburgh about possibly filming in their location and they said that as long as I don’t have an extremely elaborate setup, get the consent of the players, and blur out the people in the background I would be allowed to film there.

SEM – Bee

All of my captures are of a bee.

It was pretty interesting how this bee only had one type of pollen found on it, even though there are so many different types that exist. I also was able to see the bee’s second pair of eyes (on its forehead) which is something I never really noticed before.

There were two photos I took of the same shot with a change in focus:

Found some pollen:

The bee’s hair looked like grass:

It was pretty surprising to go into this experience knowing close to nothing about bees and coming out of it knowing about their diet and anatomy through only magnified visual observation.

Reading1 Response

Before this reading, I personally associated older methods of photography with tintypes. I feel like this is because I associated tintypes with the stereotype that people usually hold toward photos – that they are efficient, objective, and develop as quick as the press of a button. What I never really considered before was how different methods of photography’s exposure times determine a photo’s ideal use and audience. I always grouped all photography into a category defined by modern digital photography’s traits, however reading about methods like dry collodion or Raman plates allowed me to see past this. These ways allowing photographers to capture multiple exposures in series or keep an image exposed for longer periods of time really demonstrated its effectiveness in scientific or military research as compared to more conventional street portraiture of the tintypes.

An opportunity I find interesting is how we can start to mimic older scientific photography methods (like Maria Sibylla Merian’s botanical drawings) which they state in the reading “rely on an entirely different understanding of truth”. These images capture specimens throughout time in different stages of their lives all within one composition. I am interested in how we can mimic these observational drawings with modern day photography thanks to the science behind capturing and layering multiple exposures together in one image.

Looking Outwards

My post focuses less on a specific project and more on a method of capturing that has been used throughout generations that I really find fascinating.

Kirlian Photography – or more popularly known as aura photography – started off as a method which did not use a lens at all. You would place an object onto photographic film on top of a metal plate. Then a high voltage current would create an exposure, which when exposed to light would create an “aura” print.

Two Kirlian photos comparing the aura prints of the tip of David Bowie’s forefinger before and after consuming coke. These were used for album cover artwork.

This idea was later remixed into the auraCamera, which is a device where people place their hands on biofeedback receptors which measure their electromagnetic field and an attached data box converts the energy readings into frequencies that correspond to certain colors. These newer cameras create the more recognized versions of aura portraits that we see regularly today – polaroids with color clouds on top of them.

I am interested in how the interpretation of these images have changed due to popular culture and business practices. Aura photography is still a prospering business (its recent revival on social media apps may have also aided in this), even though now we can easily look up an explanation to how these photos are scientifically captured. It seems that people would rather lean into its debunked paranormal myths. Also, I find it fascinating how Kirlian photography was first created to capture the energies of living things that were not human. You can take “spiritual” snapshots of literal objects, which I think also makes people re-evaluate what we should believe to have a spirit and what we should not.