Slit survey: time compression horizontally

^{Photo: Jay Mark Johnson}



Before you original picture, without processing in the photo editor or the use of any artistic effects. Exceptionally accurate documentary photo. Only this is not a picture of one moment, as in a normal photo. The frame contains events that occurred for about 30 seconds in an interval of 1 pixel wide space. The picture was taken by the slit photo method.



The camera makes the frames in a pixel wide, and then glues the vertical stripes into one picture. As a result, we see what happened in the frame (slit) for a certain time. It can be concluded, for example, that the second horse in the picture above has passed the gap faster, because its “size” is smaller than that of the first horse.



Slit shooting allows you to get beautiful pictures. It is all the more surprising that there are no distortions on them, it is just another way to look at the surrounding reality.

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<sup>Photo: Jay Mark Johnson





Photo: Jay Mark Johnson</sup>



The pictures seem fantastic, although they are absolutely accurate. Slit photo has been used in sports for almost 150 years. Modern photo finish systems operate on the same principle, removing only the finish line pixels, and then composing a large photo from them. The peculiarity of such a frame is that all the athletes in the photograph, and even the individual parts of the body of each particular athlete, are depicted at different points in time, but on the same line of space.







This technique is sometimes used in cinema. For example, the slit footage was used in the screensaver of the Doctor Who series, as well as in the films Space Odyssey 2001 and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Star Trek: The Next Generation, TNG).



As you can see, the effect of space-time distortion is best suited for science fiction films, which is surprising.



The video made by the Australian master Daniel Crooks (Daniel Crooks), well demonstrates the effect of the slit shooting when composing a video sequence.







By its nature, the effect of slit shooting is easily algorithmized. You can take any video shot by a static camera (for example, a webcam) - and combine columns of pixels with the same coordinates from different frames. That is, from a video of 640x480 pixels, lasting 60 seconds at 25 fps, you get a picture of 1500x480 pixels.



PS One of the readers of Hacker News in the discussion on the topic of slit shooting, presented the implementation of a similar effect on JavaScript , taking a picture from a webcam (need WebRTC support in the browser).