My Camera Tossing Technique
If anyone has seen my Flickr page in the last week you have noticed a large amount of pictures that are made by "Camera Tossing." If you are unaware of what that is a brief explanation is a photograph taken where the camera and photographer are not in direct contact with each other. It literally means tossing the camera in the air while a picture is being taken.
During the beginning of the month of February I put together a collection of 36 different camera toss pictures where each one represented a different flag. You can see the whole collection here.
These new flag camera tosses were done using two different sources. The idea came into my head that I could use two different computer monitors to get two different looks. The LCD screen monitor is a source of constant light, and a CRT monitor will give 30 interlaced frames a second creating the solid shapes you see.
Unfortunately this method did not work for me since the two screens were off on color temperature and light levels. So I went on to build a light box where I could control the light levels with different watt bulbs. I would switch between 60w and 100w depending on how thick the color gel was.
The picture to the left shows the light box with a plate of seven cut out slots. Most of the flags were done with a plate that just had three slots. Behind the plate is a sheet of light diffusion. This was needed to get a more consistent look from the slots, otherwise the bulb in the light box would create some unwanted highlights. With the diffusion on it looks just like a bright light passing through plexiglass, i.e. that thing you place negatives and slides on at the photo developer.
After all this was built I was able to start creating the images to be placed on the monitor. I was lucky enough to have a semi-pro monitor around that I could change the brightness/contrast and color temperature really fast. The monitor would be able to give me repeating union jacks, stars, moons and any other crazy thing on a flag.
Then I was able to take pictures, a lot of pictures. My guess is that I took around 2200-3000 photos for the 36 photos I choose to share. I have around 1000 versions of photos of the different flags, but that does not include the many, many different photos I trashed before or after I put on the computer. Surprisingly the best one was not hard to choose for the most part. There was almost always a stand out in each set.
During the beginning of the month of February I put together a collection of 36 different camera toss pictures where each one represented a different flag. You can see the whole collection here.
These new flag camera tosses were done using two different sources. The idea came into my head that I could use two different computer monitors to get two different looks. The LCD screen monitor is a source of constant light, and a CRT monitor will give 30 interlaced frames a second creating the solid shapes you see.
Unfortunately this method did not work for me since the two screens were off on color temperature and light levels. So I went on to build a light box where I could control the light levels with different watt bulbs. I would switch between 60w and 100w depending on how thick the color gel was.
The picture to the left shows the light box with a plate of seven cut out slots. Most of the flags were done with a plate that just had three slots. Behind the plate is a sheet of light diffusion. This was needed to get a more consistent look from the slots, otherwise the bulb in the light box would create some unwanted highlights. With the diffusion on it looks just like a bright light passing through plexiglass, i.e. that thing you place negatives and slides on at the photo developer.
After all this was built I was able to start creating the images to be placed on the monitor. I was lucky enough to have a semi-pro monitor around that I could change the brightness/contrast and color temperature really fast. The monitor would be able to give me repeating union jacks, stars, moons and any other crazy thing on a flag.
Then I was able to take pictures, a lot of pictures. My guess is that I took around 2200-3000 photos for the 36 photos I choose to share. I have around 1000 versions of photos of the different flags, but that does not include the many, many different photos I trashed before or after I put on the computer. Surprisingly the best one was not hard to choose for the most part. There was almost always a stand out in each set.
6 Comments:
wonderful project. I forgot to link to this from the camera toss blog... going back to update now. ;)
Wow dude. That's awesome that you were so enthusiastic about it. Rooock on! :)
I'd say the results are worth the effort. It's really eye catching!
This might seem a little crazy to me, but everybodies' comments are made at 4am.
Yeah, only wierdos and ghouls are reading blogs at 4am...
Not me, I'm not a wierdo. It's 1p.m. in the afternoon and I think this is an amazing idea.
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