A form I was looking at asked for customers to submit ONE photo of BOTH sides of their ID card. I spoke with the developers of the form and they are changing it.
But then it made me wonder is it really that impossible? Are there no creative ways to do it?
I prefer methods that don't use mirrors.
Ok, since you've asked for creative ways, here we go.
Place the id card at the left side of the frame, take an under exposed photo with a long shutter time (5 seconds), fire a flash, turn the id card around and place it at the right side of the frame, fire the the flash a second time.
We now have both sides of the id card in a single shot without any mirrors. If the flash was located close to the id card and the background is far away, we can even have a nice black background.
Well, you asked for creative, you didn't say practical:
Gravitational lensing. Place the card edge on and behind a sufficiently massive body. Position the card and camera correctly and both faces will be visible, albeit substantially redshifted, one side worse than the other.
Obtaining the sufficiently massive body (neutron star or black hole) to do so is left as a problem for the user, as is protecting the card from the incredibly harsh environment that exists at the location it must be when the picture is snapped.
Split the card along its thickness and photograph the halves side by side. Glue them back together if necessary.
Alternatively, lose the card, have it replaced, and then find the original. Photograph the reverse of one with the obverse of the other.
The solution is simple. Give up on that sissy 35mm or digital stuff, and get your hands on some film for real photographers: 4x5 film!
Then all you have to do is go in a dark room, wrap the film around the ID, and make a contact print (err... contact negative?) with a single strobe flash! If you can tune the flash correctly, there should be a difference in tone between the film exposed by the flash and the reflective white of the card below it vs the fiml exposed by the flash but no reflection because it was over a black surface.
Go big or go home! =D
It can be done with a single shot on a smart phone.
In this photo I stuck my "ID" (business card) on the end of a pen and started a panoramic shot with an iPhone. Once the card was out of shot, I flipped it and moved it so it would be back in shot again.
I cropped the photo to remove superfluous background.
Important to keep the card steady! You can see some artifacts of movement in the left side card especially
.
This solution is available to most digital camera users, without need for strobes, motors, optic fibre, film, neutron stars or other more exotic equipment.
One possibility might be to use an old film based moving slot shutter panoramic camera - these used to be used for things including photos of large groups of people (for example, school photos). To allow for the panoramic format, without excessively complex lenses, rather than using a conventional full frame shutter, the camera basically used a rotating (around a vertical axis) lens assembly with a slot (and I think it may have curved the film plane as well).
As the lens rotated, the slot meant that only a thin vertical strip of the film was being exposed at any time - a bit like a dual curtain SLR shutter at high speeds, except that I believe the panoramic camera may have controlled the exposure by changing the rotation speed.
So when you took a picture, it would start exposing at one side of the subject, and scan across to the other side. Apparently, if you were very quick, it was sometimes possible to appear in the photo twice, if you could get to the other end after it'd exposed your original position.
With a suitable close up lens, you might be able to flip and move the card to the other side before it exposed that part.
A more modern (and probably simpler) alternative would be to flip the card on a flatbed scanner, after it's scanned the first side.
option 1. Get out two phones, take a picture of one of the sides with one phone, take a picture of the other side with the other phone. Then, show the images on both phones and use your camera to take a picture of both phones.
option 2. Cut the card into tiny strips and flip every other strip.
option 3. go into a dark (ish) room, set the shutter speed to 30 seconds and attach camera to a tripod. Put the ID card on the left side, click the button, wait 15 seconds, then quickly flip it over and move to the right side and wait another 15 seconds. You now have both sides in one exposure
"submit ONE photo of BOTH sides of their ID card"
This is Stackexchange, we can do better!
Setup Camera and hold your ID Card so that one corner points at the center of the Lens, click.
Now you have a single photo of TWO edges and BOTH sides; so no matter what you think the word "side" means you have two, and you have the front and back for a bonus.
Technical Note: Other answers may result in injury, damaged Card, blurry image and likely would take longer to do - those pitfalls don't exist with my suggestion. 😉
If the card is placed perpendicular to the camera, a large and powerful convex lens might be able to capture both sides, by virtue of bending the light back inwards. Two lenses in series is also an option: (image source)
Alternatively, two convex lenses alongside each other could be used to redirect the direction of projection. In this photograph you can see each lens is revealing a different side of the railing. (image source)
You could photograph one side, make a print, lay it next to the card with the other side up and photograph the two. But I agree, it's a silly requirement.
Solution with only one exposure. Illuminate the ID card from behind with a strong enough light, then take a picture from the front side. Both sides will be visible in the picture. Although the two sides are superimposed and not distinguishable, it's still technically a picture of both sides of the ID.
Use a 3D photo camera and put the ID-card with one side towards the left lens and the other towards the right lens. i.e. put it "between the eyes" and make a cross-eyed photo. May result in bad quality :)
Take a 35mm movie camera (and more curiously, one that has capability of taking single shots). Take 2 shots of front and back one after another. Remove the film from the camera, develop it, cut it to the length of still 35mm film, take it to a lab and lie to their faces that this is a still film and you want prints from it.
A 35mm still frame is basically 2 35mm movie frames one next to another, so the lab guys will be tricked into printing TWO frames on ONE sheet of paper without even knowing they're serving your nefarious plan.
Laugh like an evil mastermind.
/edit: yes, in it's core it's a double exposure that has been mentioned already several times, but my point is to exploit the overlaps in existing infrastructure to do the double exposure for you.
Without using mirrors (or, less likely, prisms, fiber optics, or exotic non-photographic lenses), there's no way in one simple exposure, but it is trivial to combine two different shots into a single image. This single file could then be submitted to an online form.
I wouldn't recommend that from a UX perspective, since it's a big hoop that many non-technical users won't be able to surmount, but it's not hard for anyone who knows their way around an image editor.
It's an easy two-step process.
Take the card and camera into a pocket universe whose geometry is such that space-time wraps round upon itself in a short distance (the details of accomplishing this are left as an exercise for the reader). Hold the card so that both sides are visible to the camera, albeit at different apparent differences. Take your photo. Return to our universe with the card and camera.
Make a hologram of your ID card. You have to walk to see both sides, but they will both be there.
