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3d Stereo Photography

All > "Art" > Photography > 3d Stereo Photography by natetrue

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This is one of my favorite go-to photography methods. When you feel a scene's depth can't be protrayed in two dimensions (or you're incapable of composing photos to that effect, like me), just take a photo with your camera, move about five inches to the right, and take another. Of course, this is best done with unmoving subjects. You can try and set up a two-camera setup but it is expensive and clunky to carry around.

One issue with this photo method is that relatively few people are able to enjoy it. The technique for seeing cross-eyed stereograms is a little difficult to learn, but I hope to aid you in seeing them.

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Take this stereogram, for example. Don't click on it just yet - for practice, you will view it in its small form. While the effect is reduced in the small form, it's much easier to get. Grab a pen or pencil and hold it in front of the image like so:

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Start with the tip in the very center of the image, pretty much touching your monitor. Move the tip VERY SLOWLY in a straight line toward you, making sure to focus your eyes exactly on the tip of the pen. When the tip is about five inches from your monitor, your depth perception will start to trip out a bit. Stay calm and stay focused on the pen tip.

At some point you'll notice that the image from your monitor has "jumped" out and is somewhere in the vicinity of your pen tip instead. Try now to look at the image instead, and slowly move the pen tip away.

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Don't get frustrated if the image goes away quickly! This is a difficult skill to learn for some people. Return the pen to its position and bring it toward you just like before. At the point the image returns, hold the pen still and practice looking from your monitor to the pen tip. Try to notice how the pen tip divides into two, and how the image jumps from your monitor into the space in front.

Play around with the focus a bit, too. The trick to these 3-d pictures is that you need to be focused on the monitor but your eyes need to be looking at a point in front of your monitor.

Practice makes perfect! Try your skills at the following photos.

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This is a great example of when a 3-d picture is appropriate. The sand all kind of blends together in a two-dimensional photo, but you can see the serpentine ditch when you go 3-d.

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3-d photos are also really great when elements don't lend themselves to depth perception. The jutting lily pads in this photo don't stand out until you see the depth.

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The technique changes a bit when you're taking pictures up close. Usually for these you don't need to move the camera more than a half or a quarter inch.

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Likewise, for in-airplane photos of extremely distant objects, a couple hundred feet of separation is required.

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I think tableware sculptures will have their own creation :)

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Creating the final side-by-side composites is fairly simple. Just put them into your favorite image-editing program, resize each to 320x240, and paste them into one photo, with the image taken on the left on the right side, and the image taken on the right on the left. If the depth looks wrong, reverse the photos.

I like to use the following ImageMagick batch file:

set dest=n:\photos\stereo\stereograms
:again
montage %2 %1 -tile 2x1 -geometry 320x240+0+0 "%dest%\%~nx1"
shift
shift
if "%~dpn1"=="" goto end
goto again
:end

Change the dest path to where you want to store the stereograms, and save the batch file into "C:\Documents and Settings\(your user name)\SendTo\Stereogram.bat" - then select pairs of photos, right-click the left one, and go Send To -> Stereogram.bat. The stereogram will appear in the dest folder!

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