Photographing the Screen

Photographing the screen with a camera is a technique that can be used to conceptually separate the photographic act from the screen. It also allows different effects and aesthetic qualities to be combined with the digital look of the game image, allowing potentially interesting visual languages to emerge.

The shutter speed of your camera should match the refresh rate and frame rate of your monitor. Experiment with lower or higher shutter speed settings to see the effects of photographing portions of the screen that are either not drawn yet or drawn multiple times. Start at 1/30th and tweak until the settings match the desired result.

Photographs of a screen taken with a digital camera often exhibit moiré patterns, which appear as odd stripes or irregular ripples on the screen. This effect can be a desired aesthetic to manifest the relation between the apparatus and the screen, but if undesired it can be fixed by changing the camera angle, the camera focal length, lowering the shutter speed or editing the image in post-production software.

To avoid the intrusive presence of the screen’s materiality, game images can also be projected on different surfaces and photographed as the game interacts with the space it is projected upon.