Today’s guest post is by Andrew Kornylak. You probably remember some of his stop motion videos taken with a Nikon D3 I posted back in 2009. The topis he will cover today is “Hacking the Digital: Stills in Motion”:
Before I “became” a professional photographer, I was a software developer. Windows applications, wireless devices, game software, web… This was the late 90s, and we hacked everything, pushing beyond design limits. We rolled our own script languages, designed database engines from the ground up, dissected device drivers, and programmed using interrupts and bit operations. It was awesome. A small alpine-style team of programmers could go anywhere and do anything, applying their craft and creativity to this magical hardware. Create a server to host interactive games to half a billion Chinese cell phone users? Yeah, we can hack that out in our garage.
But all good things come to an end. Eventually the hackers got so good at it that their hacks became the standard, and soon all you had to do was take a class on it and learn how to pull the levers. Projects became so big that it took an army of lever-pullers to do anything cool.
I left that world about the same time digital cameras started hitting the shelves. Hacking photos is pretty much the same: These magical little machines can do much more than what they were designed for. Even better: you can see the results, right there, in a picture. Or in a bunch of pictures.
I’m going to share a couple examples of hacking the digital camera. First I use multiple cameras to create motion in a still image. Then I use one camera and multiple stills to create motion.
credit: Andrew Kornylak / Aurora Photos
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