Forget about 1D, It’s all about 3D!

Well it’s been an interesting month of photography after Dave Dewson’s excellent tutorial on 3D Photographs or Anaglyphs using two photos.

The topic for August was due to be “Blind” but we thought that everyone would try and  be funny and post a completely black image. After the tutorial it was agreed to change the subject to “3D”.

I’ve travelled around the UK a bit in August too with the opportunity to take some pictures that might make a good 3D image in Wentnor (Bishops Castle), Bovington Tank Museum, Bruntingthorpe Proving Grounds and Washford Heath Gas Towers in Brum.

After Dave had run us through the process of taking a shot I was desperate to give it a go…..

The first effort I tried was down a stream in Wentnor, Green Park Caravan site after a night of trying to sleep in a sleeping bag that was too small for me. I learned the next day that the bottom of it was turned in on itself, I’d Apple Pie’d myself, what a dolt.

This image, if you have your 3D Red/Cyan glasses on your mush does have a subtle effect where the grass in the very foreground is in your face , the tree in the stream sits in the mid and provides a path through to get to the rear of the shot. I was pleased with this but didn’t think it was punchy enough to win me a compo!!

I took all of the photos for this process by holding my head level, having the viewfinder on my camera in front of my left eye, noting what the focal point was and which marker it was on, then after taking the picture move the camera so that my right eye was looking through the viewfinder. I made sure to get the marker in the same place and focus on the same area before taking this shot.

This gives it the natural distance between my eyes, and while my measurement may be weird, it seems to work for me. If your eyes are too close together or too far apart then I can’t help you. Also worth noting is that if you have a lazy eye or some sort of stigmatism that prevents both eyes from functioning as a pair then this will likely impair your enjoyment of these 3D images.

Once I’d found that I could do this I began to look for inspiration in every place we went. Luckily, the week after our camping adventure we went to Three Legged Cross in Dorset on holiday. Nearby was the Tank Museum where we went for one of the two days when it was a bit damp. I looked at all of the fabulous exhibits in here and marvelled at some of the ways that technoology has changed over the years and even seeing Fury, the tank from Brad Pitt’s war movie. Not the one where he carves swastika’s into Nazi’s heads, the other, new one.

There were loads of opportunities in here for a 3D piccy so I was looking down the barrels of some tanks but when I looked back at them in the camera, without the 3D processing, I realised that there was nothing behind, save for a blank wall, that would make the image more interesting.

I stumbled upon a set up of a machine gun nest with two dressed mannequins and realised that it was ideal for the job. The gun could stick out in front of the image, the soldiers sat just behind that, the arch above them would make a path through to see the pieces of wood in the rear of the image. I was very pleased with this photo.

After a few more images from the Tank Museum didn’t work out I left it until I got to the Cold War Jets day at Bruntingthorpe Proving Grounds where a number of jets from a bygone era are brought out in front of the crowd at what is essentially an airshow where the planes don’t get into the air. They do an exercise called “Fast Taxi” that sees the beasts such as the Victor, Lightning, Nimrod, Buccaneer, Canberra all power up to the max and then launch themselves down the runway past the crowds.

Plenty of opportunities here too, Graham Cartwright  from the Cat PS club was there too and we were taking some similar photos, Graham took a great couple of images of the missile on the side of the English Electric Lightning and then submitted this great photo of an Avro Shackleton into the month compo.

I took a few photos of the outside of some aircraft, with the front of the Lightning being a good example but there were a lot of people around, moving in between the shots. None of these really floated my boat but some images I took of the cockpits did the job for me and I was close to submitting one of the following images .

Out of the following three I like the one of the centre console showing the throttle levers with the little screen on the panel in the rear of the shot. The photo with the two yokes is also a tidy result for me and I was close to choosing one of these for the months category of 3D.

In the end, I left the decision in the arms of my fans, or my two kids as I like to call them usually, they liked the machine gun photo as it popped out of the screen so that’s the one I went for.

For those of you that haven’t seen this process in action I’ve recorded a video and put it on youtube so that you may be able to find it a bit easier to do.

If you need some 3D Specs, you can do a lot worse than looking on ebay here. They’re relatively cheap too!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, if you have or haven’t, please feel free to leave a comment below.