The Days Are Getting Longer

With the winter solstice (Dec 22, 2005) now past us, we look forward to the ever so slightly increasing amount of daylight. It's always tough to go to work mostly in the dark, only to emerge 8 hours later– also in the dark.

The winter solstice reminds me of an elementary science class topic. Can you stand an egg on it's end during the solstices (or equinoxes)? This is supposedly due to the distance of the moon and the earth. Well, yes, but you can do it anytime of the year as well– they're not related. It only takes patience. But it makes for good eating afterwards.

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Hi Resolution, Large Format Scanner Camera

Damn it, I wish I thought of this first. This is what happens when you combine a large format camera (think 4×5) with a traditional flat-bed scanner attached to the back. You get a camera with oodles of megapixels and dizzying file sizes. Sure, your exposure times go to seconds to sometimes minutes instead of fractions of a second. But the results are well worth the wait and as you can see in the picture, you can have fun with this “limitation.”

This reminds me a lot of my first encounter with a Polaroid land camera for which you can no longer buy film for. Instead, I stuffed photo paper into the back and exposed on to that.

The great thing about this project, is that the current scanner-camera being used is a Canon LiDE 20 USB scanner, which I have. It's cheap, small, lightweight and is bus powered.

The site was slashdotted so you'll have to visit one of the mirror sites listed.

Link.