Saturday, June 23, 2012

Double vision

Just for fun, I had a go at stereoscopic photography on our recent trip to Meigetsu-in. I hadn't realised just how easy it was. So long as the subject matter isn't moving, there is no need for any fancy stereo camera gear, you just have to take two photos, moving the camera a small distance between shots. It doesn't even seem to require any great precision in composition. To view, you need to deconverge (not cross) your eyes so that each looks at a different image. It may take a little practice to separate the convergence from the focus distance, but once you have locked to the image on you should be able to look around it quite easily.


The first seems to work a little better, perhaps because there are more layers at different depths. But the lower one is the famous worn steps, free of tourists for the few few minutes after opening while the keen photographers all quietly line up to take their pictures!

6 comments:

Allen Knutson said...

Pretty. But why such little pictures? I find it harder to make them a single image, when so much of my field of vision is becoming a double image.

With yours I managed it by enlarging them a lot. Then, of course, they were blurry.

James Annan said...

Ah, I see blogger has made them a little bit smaller - clicking on the pictures should get you the slightly larger originals. There's a natural upper limit of the eye distance (6.5cm) for the width of each half (since it's hard to get past parallel), and jules preferred a smaller size. Of course it also depends on the pixel density on your screen.

Hank Roberts said...

yes yes YES!
And you can have great fun from high speed aircraft, which makes the effective size of your head some thousands of feet across between one photograph and the next:

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/wossname/3204885281/sizes/m/in/set-72157612681666970/
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/wossname/2320332668/in/set-72157612681666970/lightbox/

P. Lewis said...

The steps look more impressive to me.

When it works I see all "three" images. And I can skip between left and right and back to the "centre image" without losing the 3D effect.

Hank Roberts said...

P.S., getting into stereo, you can justify owning _two_ cameras:
http://archive.org/details/HankRobertsStereoMitziyawns
(Arranging a black 'canvas' twice the width of the images removes some of the visual clutter when fusing).

James Annan said...

Ah, but two identical cameras is less fun than two different ones...