Jonathan in the Snow -- now in Amazing Ploktavision!

[bohemiancoast]

This is a colour anaglyph video, so you need red/cyan 3d glasses to view it. This is my first try at putting a stereo video on YouTube. It's quite compressed as an embedded file; you can see a higher quality version of this video by going directly to YouTube.

Comments

[gaspodia.livejournal.com]

Vindication for buying Spy Kids 3D at last :)

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Technical queries: two cameras? What did you use for the color shift and all that?

Fun stuff.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I use a twinned Sony DSC-P200, made for me by Co Van Ekeren. The power, shutter and zoom are wired together so you can take pictures with quite a lot of motion at exactly the same time. (Before I got this camera, I used two Fuji digital cameras mounted on a lump of metal using their tripod mounts; they weren't wired together and you just had to press the shutter at the same time.) Some 3d photographers who take high action shots need to take more elaborate measures to keep their cameras in time, but for 'typical' hobby photographers the Ekeren cameras are ideal. The video is a sort of free extra; modern compact digital cameras come with basic video included.

If you're just interested in 'having a go' at 3d photography and you only have one camera, you can take two photos of something that doesn't move. Choose a subject where nothing is closer than about six feet, with several objects at different depths. Move your camera about 65mm horizontally between shots, keeping the camera settings, vertical height and direction the same. These shots are known as cha-chas, and I took some very good cha-chas when I was first getting started before I had twin cameras. You can also take stereo photos of landscapes (hyperstereos) by finding someone with the same camera as you and taking a photo at the same time.

All of these methods give you two sets of photos (a fringe benefit is that you get the 2d photos as well, and the first photo I put on LJ was the right hand half of a stereo pair). I then use free programs (Windows only, but of course I run them happily under VMWare Fusion on my Mac) called StereoPhotoMaker and StereoMovieMaker to stitch them together to make stereo pairs. StereoPhotoMaker, in particular, does a very good job of automatic alignment, which takes out a huge amount of the drudgery involved in mounting stereo photos.

These programs can output in a variety of formats. For still photos I don't much like anaglyphs (the red/cyan pictures) because I find them irritating; I mostly view parallel pairs -- using the Pokescope for onscreen viewing, and the Loreo Lite Viewer for 3d prints. That last is particularly good for giving people; you can give people a set of prints and a viewer and the viewers are very cheap (though not as cheap as red/cyan glasses, which most people have anyway). But for video the anaglyph format is great, especially for things like YouTube.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

you can take two photos of something that doesn't move. Oh, yes.







First three from about 1981 (Statesboro, Georgia, USA). Last one Middleham, 1997.



Thanks for the technical info. I've thought about how nice it would be to have two cameras I could mount side by side (on a piece of wood with the hardware on it to attach the cameras, and which could itself be attached to a tripod) with shutter cables I could hold in the same hand, so I could take pictures of moving subjects. I actually have a camera now that should do that, a remarkably cheap 35mm job I bought years ago. For a brief time there were 3D disposable cameras you could get lenticular prints off of, but those went away.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Oh, very nice. These would benefit from a run through StereoPhotoMaker to clear the alignment issues (even with identical cameras, you find you get rotation and sizing errors which make it harder to see the stereo image).

The two cameras on a bar approach is amazingly doable. The first pair I had were Fuji MX-700s, which probably have an eBay value of about £10 each these days, and the second pair were Fuji F601 zooms, which now would cost perhaps £30 in good working order complete with SmartMedia cards. The bar with two holes in it (the cameras were mounted approx 75mm apart, which is slightly wide but not enough to worry about) cost me a five from a local workshop; I lined it with neoprene to prevent vibrations and bought two tripod screws for a couple of quid each from a camera shop. These Fuji vertically shaped cameras are really great for stereo, and they're really cheap on eBay now. You can't take very fast motion with these, but they're fine for portraits, candids, pictures in a gentle breeze or with people moving in the background, that sort of thing.