Your one stop shop for everything photo-video
We’ve seen a lot of Game Boy Camera hacks over the last few years. We’ve seen them rehoused into camera cases, modified to take “real” lenses, converted into webcams, and shrunken down to game cart size.
But all of those mods have one thing in common. They require a Game Boy (or the guts of one). This mod, however, from Raphael Boichot, only uses the camera and some custom electronics based on the Raspberry Pi Pico.
On the topic of weird AI cameras, the Paragraphica has to be the weirdest I’ve seen so far. Like the Black Box Camera we featured a couple of months ago, this one creates an image using AI. Unlike the Black Box Camera, which takes a picture of the scene, uses AI to determine what’s in the scene and then uses that to generate a prompt for the AI to make an image, this one uses GPS data.
There’s no lens at all on this “camera”. It figures out where you are based on the GPS data. From there, it determines the time of day, weather conditions and what your surroundings look like. This generates the prompt that the Paragraphica uses to create its output image. Not surprisingly, it’s powered by a Raspberry Pi.
While there are plenty of digital Leica cameras out in the world, that’s not enough for some people. For example, people like robotics engineer Michael Suguitan, who has used his considerable talents to stuff a Raspberry Pi and High-Quality Camera Module into a Leica M2. It’s called the Leica MPi, and the process is completely reversible, allowing it to turn back into a standard Leica M2 at a moment’s notice.
As an MPi, it has about a 5x crop factor, which limits Michael’s lens options somewhat unless he wants to shoot super telephoto. He has been using it with a Voigtlander 12mm f/5.6 lens in order to get a field of view equivalent to about 60mm on a full-frame sensor.
Good video cameras do not come cheap. Actually, they are pretty expensive. Even the basic ones. And if you want RAW video recording, you are looking at no less than $1,899. (Hey, if you know any camera that does RAW video for less, hit us in the comments). Well, this is changing. Enter CinePI – an open-source cine camera.
CinePi is a free, open-source project that includes the hardware, firmware, and electronics to build a fully working 2K camera with incredible specs for under $200. The downside, you would need to be quite a tinkerer to build it.
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.
This is one of the oddest and most curious cameras I’ve ever seen. It has a lens and a sensor and can actually record the real scene in front of you, but it doesn’t do that. Instead, it detects what’s in your scene using AI and turns it into a text description. This text description is then fed into an image-generating AI whereby it makes an image based on that description. And that’s the “photo” you end up with.
As I said, it’s a curious camera and a very interesting concept. The camera itself is very unassuming. Essentially it’s a twin-lens camera, much like a twin-lens reflex (without the reflex bit), in a big black box. It has a waist-level viewfinder on top and the actual camera lens below, along with a big red shutter button on the front. Shortly after you hit that button, it spits out an Instax print of the AI-generated scene.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a number of cameras over the years for its credit card-sized single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi (and it’s variants). The first iteration was a relatively mediocre 5-megapixels. The Pi Camera 2 brought this up to 8.1-megapixels. Now, the new Camera Module 3 bumps this up to a little more useful 11.9-megapixels. It’s also the first Raspberry Pi camera with phase detect autofocus.
Sure, it’s not the 60+ megapixels of high-end mirrorless cameras, but this is a Raspberry Pi we’re talking about. It’s not designed for shooting high-resolution landscapes and fine art photography. It’s largely for smaller-scale applications like basic live streaming, monitoring and AI. The increased resolution, though, along with the addition of autofocus, opens up more potential options.
It feels like we’re having a big rush of Raspberry Pi based cameras recently. Lately, we’ve had the Paparazzo interchangeable C/CS mount camera, the accessible-anywhere Pi Cam, the Pi HQ Camera module-based Pikon, the instant animation printing Kinecam, and even seen a 65-year-old 8mm movie camera converted to digital completely non-destructively. Well now, it’s the turn of the Pieca.
This one’s pretty special. While most others have made use of the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera Module to provide it with a native C/CS mount, this one created by Tom Schucker at Tea and Tech Time comes with a Leica M mount. It still uses the Pi HQ camera module with the Raspberry Pi 4, but being Leica M mount, you can adapt pretty much any DSLR lens ever made to work with it.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a kinegram. While the term “kinegram” wasn’t really coined until the late 1990s, the process has actually been around since the 1890s. I remember they seemed to be quite popular in some kids’ toys in the 1980s before the world started getting more digital and then they kind of disappeared for the most part.
But as with a lot of old tech returning to popular culture, it looks like the kinegram is back, too. PhD student Ticha Sethapakdi and her team at MIT produced an instant Kinegram camera, the KineCAM. It’s based on a Raspberry Pi, shoots multiple images in sequence and then prints out a single kinegram on thermal paper using its built-in printer. The KineCAM was also presented this year at SIGGRAPH 2022.
You know, it’s funny. I just want from saying how there are hardly any Pi 3 portable cameras out there that make use of the Pi High Quality Camera to offer interchangeable lenses and then a bunch pop up all at the same time. This one comes from Kevin McAleer, and it’s a bit like the Paparazzo, except in a much more convenient and useful form factor while still sporting a large touchscreen interface.
As it’s using the Pi HQ Camera module, it has a C-mount on the front to provide interchangeable lens options. You can even get C-mount adapters to let you use Nikon, Canon, M42 and other lenses on there, so you’re not just limited to C-mount lenses. It’s powered by a NanoWave 5000mAh USB battery pack and while the software still needs a little work, the hardware all comes together pretty well.
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe
Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.
John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!