For the past couple of years I have been practicing photography with "circuit bent" cameras I have built. I am gonna share a few pictures, give some explanations as to the hows, and hopefully inspire some people to pick up this form of photography.Just a disclaimer here, I haven't edited these photos at all besides maybe cropping them. These are how to the photos come out of the camera.
First, this is what the cameras end up looking like on the inside when they're all wired up.The basic principle is shorting the data output pins on the analog to digital converter chip as well as those coming off the sensor itself with eachother (and sometimes other parts of the camera if they can be found) to screw with the image the camera is "seeing" before it gets to the main image processer.Finding these points involves a service manual + googling chip datasets if available, or a WHOLE lot of trial an error. Shorting random stuff together tends to lead to the creation of a paperweight. I recommend using an oscilloscope to probe around, as the waveform will give you an indicator if something is transmitting data or not. A multimeter is less elegant, but will let you find points that are ground and power (3.3V+, generally) and you can avoid those to prevent frying other parts of the camera.After these points are found, solder 0.1mm enamel copper wire to them and then to a interface where you can selectively short them out such as a plugbay (seen here) or a series of switches. This way you can control and layer on effects you get to your liking. There are several better write ups and examples on the internet if you google them desu.
>>4506230Weird, the photo is in the correct orientation in my files.You have to do this with old cameras, otherwise the analog to digital converters start becoming integrated into the circuit board and you cannot get them as easily. I wonder if the camera is encoding data to make it rotate like that? Gonna try another one here to see.
I think I figured it out.As you may be able to tell, I am not necessarily the most experienced photographer around. This is definitely more of a hobby for me.
>>4506232Very good anon. First interesting thread otb in months. Alyways neat to see people think outside the box and present a new take on something many take for granted.Lots of these photos look like someone tripping on LSD. Perhaps trying to focus on distorting the mundane would fly well with your photos, but establishing a good skill floor would be a better start. If you want to maybe make some really interesting shit, go learn some basics from youtoob so you can then chuck all that shit out the window and do your own thing. That process will let you get the technical side of stuff right while also avoiding the common rigid rules that so many people will fag over. No need to get everything so minmaxxed just have some fun, but if I were you that would be the direction I'd go.
>>4506238Thanks for stopping by! Glad you appreciate it. I think that is pretty solid advice, though I will say I know enough that I've noticed manipulating the aperture/shutter speed/ and iso don't necessarily translate 1:1 with these circuit bent cameras...There are certain effects that just don't appear at higher ISOs and vise versa, for instance. Sometimes you WANT the shutter speed to be way too high because otherwise the effect washes everything out.I am guessing you are suggesting I study stuff regarding composition, right?
>>4506230cool thread anon doing that kind of shit is my job so here's some quality of life stuff if you want :- you can use picrel to reverse engineer ICS without soldering, it'll clamp into the pins it's ultra useful - you can find ribbon cable to breakout converters, you just need to buy two of them and you can tap in the middle without needing to solder anything real ribbon> breakout > your sniffer > breakout > male to male adapter -usually you won't find the camera motherboard datasheet but the ADC units (for CCD) they use to convert the sensors data to digital is quite common usually using multiplexers. For CMOS the conversion happens on basically the sensor chip so it's harder to mess with the pre-digital data but it's still possible to fuck with it. I'm not familiar with the camera you are using so idk but looking at the style it looks CCD right ?
>>4506299Damn, I might have to get one of those clamps. Seems super useful for exploring models with no datasheet available on the ADC. The ribbon breakout cables would have saved me from bricking many cameras ngl, but doing it without them for so long has developed my soldering skills. Still, I might get some for the future if I get my hands on Fujifilm F-series or something else I would hate to brick.Generally, I use CCD cameras for this. Though, I have experience with CMOS cameras which have their own little quirks. The effects you get by shorting the sensor pins on a CCD are kind of limited, which necessitates the involvement of the ADC to get more variety and color popping effects. With CMOS sensors you can get by just messing with the sensor pins to get a good variety of effects and color glitches, since the conversion is done on the sensor chip as you said. See the picture on this post for an example from a shitty old Vivitar I circuitbent.Sometimes, though, and this is where the oscilloscope comes in, you can get some really unique and cool effects by straying from the sensor and ADC and attacking other points that appear to transmit data.I honestly think the next step for me is to start making an small external circuit board with potentiometers and a data inverter. Though, if you can think of any other fun circuitry I could add to mess with the signal in unique ways please let me know. A challenge is going to be figuring out how to use the camera's circuit board to power the data inverter gates without causing problems.
>>4506240you should find some photo books from famous photographers and just stare at the compositions until it makes sense. or like look at other visual artists and see what they do, watch some movies by Stanley Kubrick if u wanna see some classic composition styles
>>4506356Just had a trip to Chicago and took some shots. Sometimes I was trying to be compositionally minded, other I just shot what I thought would look good with the glitch effects.I am gonna bump the thread with them for now.
I like your hacking work OP, thanks taking time to post. I enjoy technology and art, digital photos are a nice blend of them which I have only been getting back into the last few months myself.>>4506237Very nice, kinda vapourwave aesthetic>>4506239>>4506240Cool>>4506246Sky with tree is great, reminds of psychedelic fractalsOverall quite interesting knowing why they look this way and the effort you put in to making it glitch out but still usable. The digital scramble breakdown vibe is cool.
>>4506948Thank you! If you wanna dive deeper into this subgenre, there is a nice breakdown you can find if you google "Glitch Cameras and How" by a dude named NOYSTOISE. Other terms like circuit bent photography/circuit bent cameras will bring up similar stuff, too.
What cameras did you use for your photos and what guide did you follow to modify them?
I did a project in college that was based on glitched photos, but glitching in postConvert jpg to txt, open in text editor, modify the text, then save and back to jpg. In my case, I did a series of public speakers and spliced in some of their quotes to do the glitching.Two examples,https://medium.com/lotus-fruit/what-is-post-internet-glitch-art-7baba654345ahttps://famst109ga.wordpress.com/code/Tried a few times now, but I haven't been able to reopen the jpg after modifying.
>>4508390https://www.noystoise.com/2023/03/glitch-cameras-and-how.html?m=1https://fubar.space/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Glitchwerks-Camera-Bending-TipsnTricks-at-Fubar2k22.pdfThese two guides are what I recommend. They point out the basics, but even that isn't applicable to every camera. I am sorry to say, a lot of it is experience. The more camera models you work with, the better idea you have of what to look for. More often then not, the microchips on the camera's circuit board will be labeled with a code, I recommend you look up data sheets until you find the analog to digital converter (ADC). Then, start poking around by that.I'll get into camera models now, because it ties in to what kind of poking around you do. I don't recommend beginners try ANY cameras made past 2008, by that time the manufacturers had shrunk everything down enough that it gets really hard to impossible to solder the wire to points where you can affect the image. Before then, it is a mixed bag. Canon, especially the PowerShot A series cameras, tended to include test pads for the ADC which are easy to identify and solder wire to. One tip is to look up the service manual BEFORE YOU BUY. if one is out there, it may let you know where the ADC is located. You preferably want a model where the ADC chip is on the "front" of the main PCB, i.e. facing the back of the camera and LCD screen. This will let you have the camera on while you probe for bend points. This is immensely helpful for finding the correct points to solder wire to. Again, this tends to be the case for the Canon PowerShot A series. If the ADC is on the reverse side of the PCB, this requires more advanced disassembly to get at the good parts, and you will have to solder wire first, reassemble, test, and then disassemble multiple times until you figure it out. Circuit diagrams and chip data sheets might help eliminate guesswork, but these are not always available. Panasonics tend to have this problem of putting the ADC on (1/2)
>>4509339the inner side of the PCB, so you are unable to operate the camera and access the ADC.Early Kodak cameras have proven to be easy to bend. Sonys are a little more complicated and a bit of a crapshoot on ease of bending, but they often give the best effects. Nikons tend to be on the harder side, like Panasonic's. Though, if a service manual and chip datasheet are available, this makes things much much easier.I have personally bent a Kodak Easyshare CX6330, a Sony Cybershot DSC-S85, a shitty Vivitar I forget the model of, a Canon PowerShot A530, a Olympus C-730, and a Panasonic FZ10. So, there are lots of options as long as they are pre-2008/2009.One last thing, do not waste your time on DSLRs,. The effects you can get are pretty underwhelming AND actually finding the bend points is total ass because you cannot get a live feed through the LCD screen. I've spent hours with metal tweezers carefully shorting points on a DSLR while I press the shutter button to take a picture, seeing if the image was effected at all, and realizing the effects you COULD get were not all that eye-popping. Hope this helps if you choose to get into this!
>>4508392This is pretty cool, actually! I have seen some people do neat things short circuiting the vertical and horizontal clock data lines on circuit bent cameras to get kinda similar tesselation effects. I've managed it with some cameras (see attached test photo,) but never locked it in because short circuiting those to the wrong bend point in the camera tends to turn it into a brick...Never knew you could do it in post, thanks for sharing
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>>4506636Reminds me of Starry Night
You might like this pic I found on Reddit:https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1tl3329/photo_taken_while_phone_was_shutting_off_from_low/Apparently it was due to low battery
>>4510736That's cool, I wonder if this could be recreatable on some cameras by dropping the batteryI feel like you'd be more likely to just have a corrupt file
>>4510760maybe you could pull the battery out of a cheap camera/phone at the same time you are taking the photo.Could that work?
