Camera Toss of a Camera Toss

Camera Toss of a Camera Toss, originally uploaded by jon62690.

Flickr photographer Jonathan Vo has begun exploring recursion in camera toss. A few others have posted examples previously, and I myself had been planning on playing with this concept in other ways. So a good time to blog it! Here, an example of a camera toss using a computer screen as the subject, recently posted to the group discussion on that particular sub-genre, where the image on the screen was... yup, a previous camera toss!

Being a bit of a lover of math and geometry, I find recursion delicious.

Jonathan, although fairly new to the online community, has gotten into camera tossing enough to set up his own blog/gallery for them. Check them out. He's also been one of the more active online contributors to the Camera Toss Live Community Gallery currently being projected in Command-Z at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles since it opened last month. FYI, the show closes May 26th, which is also the last chance to contribute your own.

In the forums, a new member asks the following about TV style camera tosses:

how do you do these??? No flash, dark, only TV on? Computers could work well too right?

I replied with a somewhat technical explaination:

Yes, pretty much. I assume you are already aware that the cameras are being thrown with (sometimes rapid) rotation while it is taking the pictures too? But yes, any cathode ray tube type device, which relies on scanning lines to the screen very rapidly, such as a TV or computer monitor, produces this multiple image pattern when the camera moves alot during the photograph. There is a delay between each pass of the scanning, be it progressive scanning or interlaced, and that delay is long enough for a gap or "shift" of each recording of that image in the photograph.

You'll find some displays behave differently however, such as a laptop LCD, which doesn't rely on scanning at all... and instead allows you to get smooth blurs. Each screen type has been used by different photographers of this group to achieve intentional effects made possible by those distinct properties of the screen.

(sorry, probably more technical detail than you asked for) ;-)

I could go into even more detail about refresh rates and shutter sync rates etc etc, but you can learn most of that by googling 'photographing televisions'