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
