Do These Count As Motion Pictures?
At last week's I AM Group Art Show, I got a chance to test out my new-to-me Nimslo camera. This was a "3D" camera introduced in 1980 as a way of shooting 3D images that could be viewed without glasses through a technology called Lenticular printing. Think of old school trading cards that have moving images on them if you moved the card back and forth to view it from different angels. Lenticular printing isn't around anymore, but these cameras were built to use traditional 35mm film, meaning they're still perfectly good cameras. They work but firing the shutters of 4 lenses at the same time, to capture four of the same image across the span of two 35mm negatives. These days, you can scan those negatives into Photoshop and create mini "3D" moving pictures by layering them all on top of each other and creating animations that alternate between the visible layers.
I tested it out at the gallery opening during David Vines' performance and got some pretty cool results...
The trick here is to find the right subjects to shoot in the right way, in order to really emphasize the separation between the foreground and background, and the subject's position in relation to both. It'll certainly be fun to play around with, that's for sure.