Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner
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The process of capturing an image like the one of the container port above.
The camera is pointed out of a moving vehicle and is constantly capturing a single vertical line kinda like these grayscale ones in the diagram, but a lot thinner. As the camera moves, what exactly it sees is changing. If I capture the lines from the camera quickly enough and stitch them together, I can produce a complete-looking image. It's a bit more complicated than that and getting the results looking good was rather tricky, but that's the main idea behind it.
Back in the 1990s, digital camera sensor technology hadn't caught up to the size and effective resolution of medium and large format film, so digital scanning backs were developed. They capture a high-resolution image without needing a giant grid of pixels by moving a single line of pixels (or three lines for color) across the frame. In the intervening years, image sensors have gotten pretty big (there's even one that covers 4x5" large format nowadays), but this approach is still cheaper to build for large formats than a giant sensor.
I'd been thinking about building my own digital scanning back for my large format camera for a while, but I've never quite gotten around to it because building something to mount properly on my camera seemed too daunting. (Buying one could have been an option, but ones from the 1990s still go for thousands of dollars on ebay and require reconstructing a computing environment of a similar vintage to use.) Late last year, I was watching a video on Gigawipf's medium format scanning camera build and suddenly thought: "what if the entire camera moved and the subject didn't?" and decided to give it a shot.
Loading film into my large format camera on top of a mountain in Vermont because I'm allergic to doing photography in a normal way. (The resulting pictures from that trip are here .)
I found some previous photos in the same vein ( the Scannoramic project , John Hikerbiker's experiment , Daniel Lawrence Lu's reversal of his stationary camera , and Martin Liebscher's very interesting film shots ), but the results seemed like they could be improved upon. Surely taking the speed of motion into account and getting cleaner results wouldn't be too hard, right?