Nicola Ughi: TWINCAMERA

Nicola Ughi: TWINCAMERA by Aline SmithsonSeptember 1, 2013

Italian photographer Nicola Ughi has created a digital xpan of sorts that he is calling the TWINCAMERA. “Twincamera is my optical digital panoramic optical bench, it’s the reproduction of the binocular vision of the eyes.Printed images show the best of the system, with their amazing sharpness due to the 70 millions of pixels. His TWINCAMERA video follows:

In Nicola’s words: When I was very young the cameras that I own were not adequate for taking the images that I saw with naked eyes: 35 mm and 4:3 format gave different results from what I saw. An Hasselblad x-pan would be to much expensive for a young amateur.

Afterwards, when I started with my professional shots I enjoyed testing cuts and effects without exceeding with extreme photo retouch. I was an assertor of the conventional image. I have tested panoramas in different ways, but I was always unsatisfied. Panorama destroys the instant, one of the major peculiarities of photography. One shot freezes an instant, as Bresson told: “photography is the only art which transforms the instant in eternity”.

Sometimes after taking a picture of a group of people, I have been observing the expression of the single individuals and what they were acting: simple things, like watching the time, scratching, reading a book, playing soccer on the beach.

Every action recorded in the sensor happened in a time shorter than 1/ 125 of a second. It’s difficult to imagine a 1/125 of a second in the reality: it issomething possible only in photography.

More than once I have tried dividing the day in 1/125 of a second: 12 hoursmount to 43.200 seconds. If we took a shot every 1/125 of a second for an amount of 5.400.00 shots….every image would have been fuzzy. One only second in photography it’s a “long” time. 1/125 it’s a time, quick enough for an image not to be fuzzy, if adequately slow (a jumping horse needs at least 1/1000 of a second.)

With my camera the amount of files would be quite 216 terabytes of raws. An impracticable and really useless storage.

I tried it for the first time on the 6th of January 2013 in Marina did Pisa in the occasion of the annual “big dip”. I used two cameras on two tripods after having discussed the idea with an engineer and a mathematician skilled in geometry.

I did it with two Nikon D800 and two 50 mm Nikkor 1,4. Same exposure time, same white balance.. a synchronized remote control. The system produced an image which made me mad: I did it. This first special panoramic shot will be for me the first and the best…..

Was it possible to reproduce the action of a panoramic head at the same time with two identical cameras which couldn’t be overlapped, but only adequately placed side by side?

Afterwards I putted the heads together in order to plan a system to be patented, light, compact and easy to take round the world.

Its name is “twincamera”, and now. I am taking the system all over Europe in order to take pictures of animated “panoramas” of people, parks and towns. In order to achieve a rich portfolio to show to galleries. http://issuu.com/nicolaughiphoto/docs/issuu_twin_lr