DIY

Painting your camera is nothing new. We saw it back in 2010 when Kai Wong, then of DigitalRev TV, painted his Nikon D90 hot pink. And more recently, we saw a more careful approach from Caleb Pike at DSLR Video Shooter. Caleb’s approach certainly looked more impressive than Kai’s. At least Caleb’s camera still worked at the end of it.

Both of those, however, pale compared to the tedious detail put into this particular paint job by Patrick Nichols. He took apart a Minolta X-700 35mm SLR down to its core components to be able to redecorate his camera. He even removed individual springs, cogs and clips to be able to put paint exactly where he needed it and nowhere else.

This is quite a fascinating concept. Based around a Raspberry Pi, it takes photographs – lots of photographs – of trains passing through a station and then stitches them together to create a single long composite of the entire locomotive. It works on a similar principle to slit-scan photography, which is often used for capturing fast-moving subjects passing a fixed point – like horses finishing a race.

Slit-scan photography in the digital age typically shoots a stream of 1-pixel wide vertical slices. This is required if you’re trying to the capture speed between multiple moving objects, such as in a horse race. But in this project by “jo-m“, the “slits” are a little wider, which means fewer images are required in order to composite the final result together. But for applications such as this, it’s all that’s needed.