3D on a 2D Screen

Two ways to present 3D photos on a 2D screen.

I am now the proud owner of 2 3D cameras, one film and one digital. While my digital 3D camera has an amazing 3D screen on the back so I an see the strange 3D photos straight away, my film camera obviously doesn’t have any way to show 3D photos. Once the photos are off the cameras (scanned from the film, or downloaded form the digital), I don’t have a 3D TV or monitor, so what to do?

The traditional way: 3D Anaglyphs

3D anaglyphs use two coloured images along with a pair of special glasses with the corresponding colours over each eye to present a different image to each eye, creating the 3D effect. Because of the need to use coloured lenses, this obviously tints the colours in the photo. When your viewing with these glasses on though, the colours are close enough that you won’t care.

What you’ll need
To create anaglyphs, you will need some image editing software. You will need general purpose editing software, and software for creating analyphs. I found some free software to help out with this, it’s not fantastic, but it does the job. You can get Stereo Photo Maker from here:

http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/

Step 1.
In order to make a 3D image, you need two images taken from slightly different positions. Generally, you will have two images taken with two lenses the distance of your eyes apart. You will need to know which is left, and which is right. This isn’t critical, you know if you get them the wrong way around, and you can just switch them.

With a digital 3D camera, this isn’t a problem. You will already have two images ready to go, and in the case of my 3D digital camera, they are labeled L and R. My 3D film camera actually takes 4 half frame images, with images 1 and 4 being the correct distance apart to make a complete 3D image. When scanning in the negative it can be confusing trying to figure out and emember which is left and which is right. Like I said, you can always switch them later. Here is a scan from my Nishika N8000 3D film camera:


From here I need to grab the first and last image. The more careful I am to avoid cropping or rotating the images, the easier it will be to line them up in the anaglyph software.

Step 2.
Once you have your two images prepped, it’s time to load them up in the anaglyph maker and do some tweaking. In Stereo Photo Maker, click “Opwn Left and Right Image” (2nd open icon from the left).

Select your two images, and hit open.

Now you have your left and right images open, it’s time to combine them and do some tweaking.

First thing we should do is combine them into the red / cyan anaglyph. Click the small arrow next to the anaglyph button, and select red / cyan anaglyph.

This combines the images. If you use your glasses to look at it now, the 3D effect won’t be very good until we do some tweaking. You can do this manually, or automatically.

To let the program try and automatically align your images, click on the Auto alignment button. This is a good idea even if you plan on manually changing things. The Auto alignment tool also corrects other image differences like rotation.

After a while, the image should start to look a lot better. If you are happy with the 3D effect from this process, you’re ready to save the image. If not, you can move on the manually adjusting the alignment using Easy Alignment.

Before we go into Easy Alignment, I just want to explain how alignment affects the final 3D image. Sepcifically, I want to talk about what I call the flat plane.

The flat plane is what I call the part of the final 3D image that lines up with the monitor in your 3D image. Everything in front of the flat plane will be seen as coming out of the picture, and everything behind the flat plane will be seen as going in behind the monitor. The part of the image where the red and cyan images align perfectly will be the flat plane of the image.

In my image, I want the yellow ball to be the flat plane. This means I need the 2 images to align perfectly at the yellow ball. You can see in the above image that it almost aligns. A quick trip into the Easy Adjustment tool and I’ll be able to align them.

There is a lot of options in the Easy Adjustment tool. all we really want to worry about for now is the H. Position and V. Position scroll bars. Use these scroll bars until you see the part of the image you want to be the flat pan line up, then click OK.

From here, all that we need to do is save the image. Go to the File menu, and click Save Stereo Image…

Also of note here, is “Make Animation Gif…”

Animated Gifs

This brings us to the other way to create a 3D effect on a 2D screen, animated gifs. This method uses the animation feature of the gif image format to quickly switch between the 2 (or more) different images to create the 3D effect.

If you only have 2 images, you can use the “Make Animation Gif…” option to save the animation out, and your done. If you have more than 2 images (like my Nishika N800 scan), you can create an animated gif with all of the frames manually using an image editing program such as The Gimp. This will be the topic of my next post.

Enjoy your 3D fun!

A New Year

It’s a new year, and it’s time for some new content.

I was seriously thinking of letting my site slide. I’d not updated it in ages, and I was only occasionally getting a hit or two on my Instamatic 35mm page. I was about to make the decision, when I got the email that my account had automatically been renewed.

So, I’m taking this opportunity to actually make this thing worth while for the next year. I’m working on a couple of articles, and I’ve been starting to shoot again. Stay tuned for some actual content soon, and happy new year to all!

Instant Abuse

I’ve been using my Polaroid 300 camera for a while now, and I really like it. Despite the costs involved, I can guarantee you’ll be the center of attention at a party if You’re sporting one of these. In fact, the second time I took my Polaroid 300 to a party, my present to the birthday girl was 40 little instant photos of the people and happenings of her party. She stuck them all on her wall, and it looked awesome.

That little camera and it’s photos has taken some abuse in it’s short life, but never fails to pump out the photos perfectly. I wondered just how much abuse these photos could take. I left a single photo on the ground out in the open on my regular walk to work, and a week later (after rain and sunshine) the photo still didn’t look any diferent (apart from being wet). So here I am, armed with my camera and several ideas on how I can damage my photos to see how much abuse they will take.

Fuji Instax Mini filmControl

This image is the control. This was taken in my back yard in direct sunlight, and developed normally at room temperature. This was then scanned on a CanoScan 8600F scanner at 600dpi with no colour correcting applied. I applied level adjustments to this image (only on the black level) and saved the preset. This preset was then applied to all of the other images.

Everything that you expect from an instant photo is present here. Click on the image for full size.

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Cold

This image was taken, then immediately put into a freezer while it was developing. This greatly slowed down the developing process, almost to the point of completely stopping it. This photo was in the freezer while I did all of the other photos and had still not started to show any signs of an image appearing. I took it out, and it started to develop as per normal.

The image came out warmer and slightly brighter while developing in colder temperatures. I believe the temperature difference may have pushed the film slightly, bringing up the possibility of pushing instant film by under exposing it and developing it in cold conditions.

Heat

With even heat applied (via a hair blow dryer), the image developed extremely fast and came out underexposed and cool in tone. It seems you could possibly pull the film by overexposing it then applying heat during development.

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Extreme Uneven Heat

Applying what I learnt on the heat image, I moved the hair dryer closer to the photo, and concentrated on the middle more. The result is a very blue tinted image with uneven development. This could be used creatively to create a false vignette or gradient in the image.

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Water

As it turns out, these little photos are fairly water proof. This photo developed while immersed completely in tap water. The only difference I can see is a slightly warm colour shift in the image, and this was liekly due to the lower temperature of the water.

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Peeling

This one was a little more involved, as you can see from the image. I took another control style image (developed at room temperature) and let it completely develop. Once it was done, I took the scissors to it and took a small slither from the top and bottom, effectively opening up the photo. After peeling the protecting backing off, I hashed away all the black chemical from the back of the photo and this image was left.

Any more washing or peeling would result in removing the image itself. The image is faint, but some levels adjustment after scanning reveals a fairly interesting image. After the photo had completely dried, it curled heavily and cracked when I tried to correct it. My obvious advice here is to not do this to any photos you want to keep.

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These experiments have opened up a few possibilities for creative manipulation of developing instax film photos. Some of them aren’t practical when you’re out and about, but others might be possible.

Finally, here is a shot of all of the photos side by side for a better comparison.

High Speed Black and White

I was surprised that I was allowed to take my camera into the gig. I explained as best as I could that when I asked “Am I allowed to bring a camera in with me?”, I wasn’t talking about my point and shoot digital. “As long as it’s not massive” was the reply. After showing them the camera, I was allowed through. I didn’t plan on taking photos, but since I had the camera in the care and I was there alone anyway, I thought it was a great opportunity to do something I’d wanted to do for a hwile but never had a chance to.

Shooting film at 3200 is a strange sensation at first. You can’t believe you’ll get a photo as such low light levels, but after a while you learn to trust the camera’s metering system and look at your composition rather than the exposure readings. Trying to keep my shutter speeds above 60 (with my 50mm lens) to avoid camera shake, I found myself shooting with apertures in the f4 range.

The hardest part was getting a good position and keeping it. People (mostly drunk people) would walk in front and jump about for a hile, but thankfully they needed to keep their alcohol levels up, so back to the bar they go and I’ve got a clear view again.

This set came out exactly as I had hoped. Because of the spot lighting, Dave stands out dramatically, and the grain adds to the images. The grain can be attributed to 2 things, firstly the 3200 iso Ilford Delta film and, secondly, the Kodak D-76 I used to process the film. Everything I read about this combination was telling me it wasn’t ideal, I should hold off until I get a developer more suited to high speed film. Looking at the results now, I’m not sure I could be any happier.

The complete set can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasmus/sets/72157626808894599/

Taken on my Minolta 800si with 50mm f1.7 lens on Ilford Delta 3200 @ 3200. Developed in Kodak D-76 at 17 degrees (Celsius) for 14min 15sec. Scanned on an Epson V300 Photo and edited in The Gimp.

Lack of updates / motivation

A quick apology for the lack of updates.  Sorry.

I’ve had a tremendous lack of inspiration lately, and other factors in my personal life have prevented me from getting anything I like onto film.  I want to shoot, but everything I see is boring at the moment, and I think that is coming across in the photos I have taken recently.  As a result, I don’t like any of them enough to bother posting anywhere.

This happens occasionally, and usually something comes along to snap me out of it.  This time is going a little longer than usual, but it will happen.

Stay tuned…

Welcoming a New Member

Yesterday I bought a camera.  Not so unusual I guess, but I hadn’t bought one in a while.  I recently bought an M42 to AF adapter so I could use my screw mount M42 manual focus lenses on my AF mount bodies (Minolta 600si, 800si and Konica Minolta 5D Digital) so as soon as I saw this Praktica MTL-3 and two screw mount lenses, I snapped it up.

As it turns out, the whole kit is in amazing shape.  I haven’t even cleaned it, that’s just how it was in the shop.  The two lenses are both Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon models, one a 35mm f2.4 and the other a 135mm f3.5.  The lenses are amazing, there’s no other way to put it.  The above was shot on digital (will get film process in the next couple of days) using the adapter mentioned above, and the sharpness is mind blowing.  Zoomed in %100 It’s still sharp.  I’ve included a full resolution photo below so you can check it out.

Konica Minolta 5D Digital with Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm f2.4 @ iso 100

Looking forward to more awesome shots with these great old lenses.

Painted Black and White

Before colour film, there was only black and white.  If you wanted your picture to be in colour, you had to hand paint the negatives to add the colour yourself.  This sounds extremely painful, but remember the common film types back then were much larger than the common 35mm we use today, so in practice it was just plain painful.  The practice was used mainly in portrait photography and was wide spread until colour film came along.  The technique is used sparingly now, but there’s no doubt the images it produces have a very unique look to them.

Today, it is much easier to do your own hand painted negatives.  With the help of film scanners and image editing software you can create your own old time portraits from pretty much any photo.  I won’t go into too much detail here, but it involves using layers in your image editing software, setting the blend type to overlay and careful selection of colours.  See the before and after shots below:

Hand painted black and whites have a very distinct look.  With modern image editing software it is really not that hard to do, but can take some time to get right.  I spent a long time trying to get a realistic looking skin colour and settled on this one (that I think still looks a little washed out).  I’m working on a better explanation and how to page for this technique, so stay tuned!

Toy Panorama Camera Revisit

Occasionally I look back at photos I have taken in the past and I start to see something I couldn’t before.  When I did my toy panorama camera shootout, I got the results I expected but still found myself disappointed in the photos.  For this reason, and despite the absolute fun I had getting these shots, I pretty much ignored them.

Now I’m looking at them again and thinking “If I saw that on someone’s photo stream on Flickr, I would think they look great”.  I often get so hung up on process and equipment that I fail to see a success when it occurs.  So, why aren’t they on my photo stream? I don’t have an answer for that.  I do have a tendency not to include too many lomo style or toy camera shots on my Flickr account, mostly because it will start to look like most other photo streams.

With the huge advantage of the film to digital workflow process, I was able to make these shots more interesting than they first appeared.  I am a big proponent of changing as little as possible in the digital side of the workflow, so my images are generally only cropped, levels applied and colour balance fixed.  I will occasionally use the clone tool to remove dust or spots from photos, but not usually with these toy camera shots.  Imperfections are what make these toy camera shots stand out.

With these changes made, and some sensible level adjustments, Some of the shots really started to shine.

So do yourself a favour, go back through you photos and take a second look, you never now what you might see now that you couldn’t before!

A big thank you to the Film Photography Podcast guys for linking to me on their Facebook page!  Keep up the good work guys, always looking forward the new episode!

New Stuff

Just when I thought it was getting harder and harder to find some good 2nd hand bargains, I happen upon this pile of stuff at a local recycling centre.

I had been to this same recycling centre before and passed up on a few minor bargains, but when I saw this pile of stuff I couldn’t say no.  All together, I piad $15.80 for this stuff.  ”Bargain” doesn’t even come close to describing that.

Of all of it, I’m only keeping one item though.  The Minolta 24-35 3.5 MD Zoom.  I can actually use this, and was very excited to get my hands on a lens wider than 28mm.

Sadly, the rest of this stuff has a date with eBay.  Included in the items to sell are a hand strap for a 9xi, a vertical control grip for a dynax 7, a wireless flash controller for a 9xi and the best item of all – a Minolta M-Rokkor 40mm f2 Leica M-mount lens. (the lens is starting to grow 1 or 2 dots of fungus unfortunately).

It seems most of this stuff was still brand new when it wound up in the recycling centre.  Almost all of the items were still in plastic bags in their boxes, and even contained warranty cards and manuals!

(Pictured above is $15.80 worth of camera gear sitting on the boot of my car)

Some More Colour

These shots were taken along the Maroochydore river.  There’s a few of these little boat houses lining the riverbank.  The polariser I had on the lens made most of these shots possible in the early morning light.

Taken with my Konica Minolta 5D (digital) 28-80mm 3.5-5.6 D lens.