Strip photography

A moving scene is recorded, over a period of time, using a camera that observes a narrow strip rather than the full field.

If the subject is moving through this observed strip at constant speed, they will appear in the finished photo as a visible object.

Stationary objects, like the background, will be the same the whole way across the photo and appear as stripes along the time axis; see examples on this page.

Digital sensors do produce discrete strips of pixels that are captured and arranged one line at a time.

Many photographic devices use a form of strip photography due to the use of a rolling shutter for engineering reasons, and exhibit similar effects.

Instead, for the example of a camera moving horizontally from left to right to take a panoramic shot of a landscape, the vertical axis is still just a spatial axis, but as you look from left to right along the photo, you see an image that is both further to the right of the subject (a spatial dimension) and later in the shot (the time dimension).

In the case of diagonal motion in the direction of capture and towards or away from the camera, objects flare (expand vertically and compressing horizontally) as they approach and taper (compress vertically and stretch out horizontally) as they recede; this is because (by perspective) objects appear larger the closer they are (approximately as the inverse of distance), with increase in horizontal size yielding faster movement (parallax) and thus decreased size in the strip photograph.

This is conspicuous in long strips of races, where all the racers are viewed directly from the side, rather than from an angle depending on their position.

For example: in a rollout photograph of a head that makes more than one revolution, the subject's expression may change each time; in a race photo, a racer may go behind the camera (or around the track a second time) and pass the finish line repeatedly, or reverse direction and cross the finish line in the opposite direction; in a panoramic photo, a subject (e.g., a person) may be captured at one side, go behind the camera (or behind some opaque part of the scene), and then re-enter the frame and be captured at the other side.

Before the digital age, this was a common ploy on school photographs that were taken with a slit camera that rolled across the scene, the film moving by the same mechanism in the reverse direction.

[2] It can also be used to tell a temporally authentic story, as in a comic strip – events at one end, and consequences or reactions at the other, later in time and space.

[3] Aspect ratio varies, with some photos being similar to ordinary photos ("tableau" format), emphasizing a single image, while others are long ("strip" format), emphasizing the passage of time, as in a (single panel) comic strip or traditional scroll paintings.

Other applications include: Sports are a common use of strip photography, both for photo finishes and artistic purposes.

An early accidental example of distortion is "Grand Prix de Circuit de la Seine" (June 26, 1912) by Jacques Henri Lartigue, where the skew caused by the vertically traveling slit makes the race car appear to lean forward, creating a sense of speed.

Strip photography was notably used by George Silk at the US tryouts for the 1960 Summer Olympics,[1][4] Further photography at Life and Sports Illustrated that used strip photography included John G. Zimmerman, who borrowed Silk's camera to photograph Pete Rose and later photographed basketball players Nate Archibald and Julius Erving using a slit-scan camera for Sports Illustrated, and Neil Leifer, who used it frequently in the 1970s for athletes including Gaylord Perry and Billy Kidd, and for sports such as IndyCar racing.

[1][5] More recently, Bill Frakes (assisted by David Callow) captured Marion Jones winning the 100m event at the 2000 Summer Olympics using a strip camera.

[citation needed] More recently, Jay Mark Johnson has used slit cameras for artistic effect.

[8] Adam Magyar used a custom "slit scan" camera to record city traffic over time in his panoramic photo series Urban Flow (2006–2009).

[9] In his next project, Stainless (2010–2011), Magyar made use of an industrial line scan camera and custom software to capture panoramic photos of moving subway traffic in major metropolitan cities, including New York, Paris and Tokyo.

He later included high speed video from the perspective of the moving subway car, which captured exceptional three-dimensional detail of people waiting on the platform over a very small amount of time.

[6] Peripheral photography was pioneered by the British Museum for photographs of Greek vases in the late 19th century.

The development of aviation allowed strip aerial photography to replace previous land-based, which was notably used during the Palestine campaign (1915–18).

Artistic uses have occurred since the 1960s, with the pioneering work of George Silk, and markedly increased since the 1980s, though irregularly, with practitioners often rediscovering the technique independently and being unaware of the history.