Easy Glitch Photography with a Raspberry Pi

Throughout the 20th century, artists were using all kinds of techniques to manipulate the exposure and development of photos in strange ways for creative effects. But digital cameras changed the game. You can use Photoshop or Lightroom to manipulate the digital photo after you capture it, but that is different. Sharkbiscuit101 wanted to get back to basics, so he used a Raspberry Pi to build this glitch photography camera.

Glitch photography is the visual equivalent of circuit bending music. It relies on manipulation of the digital image capture in order to produce errors or corruption in the resulting photos.

But there are many, many ways to do that. You can modify the hardware itself so that the data captured by the image sensor isn’t recorded properly. You can also modify the way the image data gets stored.

This camera does the latter and that’s possible because it is built on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer. It captures images through a Raspberry Pi camera module. The Raspberry Pi can receive constant data from the camera module, but it doesn’t save that as an image until you ask it to. Sharkbiscuit101’s code manipulates the data as it comes in, so “snapping a photo” saves the image with those effects burned-in.

Sharbiscuit101 can adjust the manipulation in real-time using a rotary encoder and an Adafruit Mini I2C Gamepad, which has a small joystick and buttons. With those, he can cycle through preset manipulations and tweak the manipulation levels. The Raspberry Pi displays the image on an LCD screen and gets power from a USB battery bank, keeping the whole package self-contained.

As you can see, the glitched photos are very interesting and all kinds of effects are achievable.