Hey it's me Destin. Welcome to Smarter Every Day.
So most women get pregnancy photos then a couple of months later look at them and say what the heck
was I thinking, but I've decided to bring my wife here to a
(wife) spooky abandoned warehouse. Yeah it is a spooky abandoned warehouse.
And, there's a guy named Wes Whaley, and he is a light painter, one of the best ones I've
ever seen. Anyway, he lives close to me so I contacted him and said hey can you do some pregnancy photos
for me. Anyway, so today on Smarter Every Day we're gonna teach you about
light painting. Are you excited? -yes.
Behold the sexiest pregnancy photo ever made.
[laughing]
[music]
OK so this is your camera shutter, and the camera shutter
opens to reveal an image sensor. And this image sensor is made up of
several pixels. Now any time photonic energy hits the image sensor
the sensor converts this light energy into
electrical energy. So we're gonna illustrate that by blasting me with photons
So can you blast me with some red photos? Woo! Alright, there you go. Keep
blasting away. So as she's blasting, I'm gonna take these
You got em in my shirt. This red and green photon energy
and, go ahead, good job. I'm going to
slowly deposit this yellow light, which is red and green mixed,
into the top left corner here. So basically, all the energy that goes
into the image sensor, as long as it gets there before I close
the shutter, then that's what your image is gonna look like. So you can see we have
some red and blue, but up here we have yellow, which is a mixture of green
and red. So, that's how light painting works. You expose
the sensor. You add light, as if it's paint on a canvas, and then you close
the shutter. Now, the one flaw in my metaphor here is, a real
shutter doesn't open like this. Last week with the Phantom high speed camera I showed you
that the shutter opens from one side, and then it closes
from the same side. The reason it does that is you want a uniform exposure
on all the pixels. So, talk about the sensor now.
So there's two main types of image sensor. The first one is a charge coupled device or
CCD. Now CCDs are uniform, and all they do is they take..
Are you done with the particle waveform analogy there? Can I have one?
-That's done. Oh that's a good one. This is blue? Alright, so
light is a particle and a wave. So as the light comes in here
and hits the sensor you get an output voltage. That's how a CCD works. However,
a CMOS sensor, which is a complimentary metal oxide semiconductor is a little bit more
complicated. It has on-board circuitry that processes each individual
pixel as it's being exposed. So the problems with this
is that you end up having a little bit more noise, and it's a little bit more expensive to make these
chips, however they're getting really good at factoring all this stuff out. So
CCDs are typically used for really low noise applications
really low cost. CMOS chips are usually used in things that
need to have a very tight form factor, so a lot of the stuff is done on the chip itself
and you don't have to have auxillary circuit boards. So as you look at the
rest of Wes's work here just think about this. As the sensor is exposed
it doesn't matter when the light gets there. If you have a 3 watt laser over here
that blasts for a nanosecond it might be equivalent to a really low power
LED dimly shining over here. That's why you can light paint without
actually showing up in the image.
[music]
If you want to learn more about Wes and what he does, just go to the video
description down below, and click on the link going to his Flickr page. He's got a lot
of cool stuff on there and, I chose not to video some of the stuff he does, cause he's
a little mysterious and I don't want to give up his secret sauce. But if you want to try to figure it out
go check him out and contact him. Get Smarter Every Day. Have a good one.
Hey all the songs that have been used in Smarter Every Day videos so far are all together in one album. I'll put
the info in the video description. Hear you. Go ahead.
Catch a photon!
If you can get a laser then tie LEDs to your dog
and then you can shine a laser and make your dog
chase the laser, and get a good image that way. There's all kinds of good stuff you could do.
[ Captions by Andrew Jackson ]
Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.