60-461/761: Experimental Capture
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Spring 2020 • Profs. Golan Levin & Nica Ross
Prompt:
Make a field guide to your apartment.
Miranda July includes the prompt “make a field guide to your apartment” — I don’t have a yard to I made a field guide and map of my apartment. (See the link below for the actual guide)
See full model here
I used the display land app to capture and build a photogrammetric map of my apt. I’m interested in trying to do compositing with photogrammetry and other capture methods — I’m excited to this model to aid that project.
I’ve been interested in using my ceiling fan as a motion guide for my phone camera. I started by mounting my phone to the blades of the fan and capturing a slow motion video.
I’ve started to play with building rigs off of the fan:
In addition to the simple rigging systems I explored using the fan for slit scanning, with some intriguing results. To the see the original, non-compressed versions of these, click here.
Some photos of the slit scan set up:
To achieve some IRL distortion, I looked around my room and neighborhood for just about anything reflective or refractive I could find (that wasn’t meant for this, like a mirror or camera lens). None of my images are works of art so much as casual experiments, but it was fun thinking about how to approach this!
I made sort-of-triptych of distorted pictures through a glass jar held at several different heights. I love my eye in the first one!
For some physical distortion, I smushed my face with some clear plastic.
My favorite distorted image I captured, though, is this one. It’s me reflected in an outdoor electrical box. The metal is only kind of reflective, and it blurs more horizontally than vertically, which gives it a feeling of movement, though you can tell from the raindrops that the camera was still.
It looks almost like it could just be a weird camera filter, but no–it’s a sheet of metal.
Me looking at myself through the reflection of a coffee strainer or just plain through a coffee strainer
I set out to take a time lapse of my run to Frick Park but unfortunately I accidentally hit the stop button when I got to squirrel hill! Nevertheless, here’s the start of my run, every 3 seconds my camera took a picture! I always run with my phone in a snazzy neon pink fanny pack so now I know what my phone gets to see during my runs!
A Run Cut Short
For my photo of the sun, I have decided to take a picture of my bedroom light. Since I’ve been spending an enormous amount of time in my room I thought of the sun as my electric light rather than actual lighting since it wakes up with me in the morning and sets when I’m going to bed.
Pictures of me through a bead on my camera
Here are the pictures from my walk the other day. I’m back home and walked around my new neighborhood in Crystal Lake, Illinois.
This discovery was the leftover pieces of the tragedy that happened in my town this summer. My town seems to be in this weird state of forgetting the events, not wanting to be disrespectful, and also having constant reminders of what happened.
I also always forget how red my county is compared to other counties in the area. Though it’s not a direct correlation, the amount of american flags everywhere is striking, you can’t turn your head without seeing one I realized on my walk.
Here are some other things I found on my walk:
After taking a flash photo under my bed, I realize how much old packages, shoe boxes, and a clarinet that I have under my bed. Maybe one day during this self-isolation I’ll take out the clarinet and give it a try…