Slit-Scan Photography
A streak-photography technique where artwork moves past a narrow slit during a long exposure. John Whitney pioneered it in the 1950s, and Douglas Trumbull refined it for the Stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.
Spot it
- 01Long streaking light trails
- 02Stretched tunnel perspective
- 03Rainbow-banded color flow
Why it happens
Each slice of the artwork is exposed through a thin slit while it travels, so the film accumulates a stretched smear of the whole image instead of a single instant.
Recreate it in Pixio
Image edit prompt“Transform this image into a slit-scan photograph: smear the scene into long horizontal streaks of light that converge toward a vanishing point, with saturated magenta, cyan and amber banding, a dark void at the center and glowing stretched edges. Add subtle film halation. Keep the original subject and composition recognizable beneath the streaks.”
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