This is the first weird camera I made. I don’t remember where I got the idea for this. Regardless, this is basically two cardboard boxes. One box is inside the other and can slide in and out for focusing. On the front of the box is the “lens”, which is a magnifying glass. The inside of the box is blacked out, and I added black foam core to cover the part of the scanner outside the camera. The whole thing was held together by rubber bands. Professional! Instead of using film, a flatbed scanner is attached to the back of the “camera.” This is basically the precursor to the Time Warp filter on Snapchat, decades before it was released!
To take a picture, just aim it at something, then press Scan on the computer attached to the scanner. The scanner I was using at the time would save the images as PDFs, so I would have to convert them to jpg if I wanted an actual image.
Eventually the scanner died, as did the Windows XP laptop I used for it, and I repurposed it into a different kind of camera.
The finished product Top view. I always get a chuckle out of the “Made in China” label
The first images I took were self portraits as a test to see if it worked. I was thrilled to see an actual image! First picture taken was a selfie Moving my head during the scan created this garbled effect
To create cool effects you had to time it just right. Typically the “photographer” would watch the light from the scanner and guess as to when the person in the phoot had to move. Two heads! This took a few attempts… A precursor to the Spiderman pointing meme?
Here are a few more images. This is the view from the town house in Melbourne, FL I used to live in.
Later I moved to a different house in Melbourne, so I experimented with creating panoramas of the pool…one picture at a time, stitched together by hand using GIMP. I left the “frame” made by the tape on the box Here I cropped out the tape I used software to automatically stitch this one together…I think I like the manual ones better.
