A camera made from 23,000 drinking straws offers a very unique perspective
In an age where we would go to any lengths to get a unique photo, two artists, thirsty for something new, have created a camera that offers peak uniqueness.
Michael Farrell and Cliff Haynes have developed something called the Straw Camera. The name of the camera indicates exactly what it is made out of -- 32,000 drinking straws.
"The Straw Camera, which is a box stacked with approximately 23,000 black drinking straws, produces a multipoint perspective from an array," Cliff Haynes wrote on the camera's website. "The light viewed/collected by each individual tube is recorded onto the photo sensitive material placed at the opposite end."
The photos that the camera produces are both thought-provoking and stunning. It's hard to believe that this is what we would see if we looked through thousands of straws.
While Farrell and Haynes first tested the Straw Camera on inanimate objects, their ultimate goal was to capture portraits.
"The sitter would have to wait in the dark whilst the camera was loaded," Haynes explained of the process. "They were then asked to take a pose and given a countdown to the firing of the flash."
"The Straw Cameras gave us a 'net' to catch light with, and a novel view of the world to play with. The portraits depict the sitters at a resolution that is almost on a par with early television pictures," Cliff Haynes wrote.
"In a world beset by selfies with their immediate gratification, and HD television in all its glory feeding our visual appetite, a Straw Camera image of an individual, with its engineering projection and disappearance of the subject into the near fog of visual capture, gives the viewer a glimpse of just how transitory perception is."
The entire collection of Straw Camera photographs has been gathered together in a book of the same name.
Topics Cameras
Christine is a Web Culture Intern at Mashable. She has previously written for FanSided and Saturday Down South. She has a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego and an M.S. from Hunter College. Before she started writing, she worked in education as a teacher and school leader for four years. Her special talents include being able to quote The Office on command, playing non-stop Overwatch for hours, and composing only the wittiest of Tweets (her own opinion).
