Friday, January 23, 2015

DIMENSIONS: Supplement - Until January 31!

I've replaced several prints in my current show at the Forum Bookstore with recently printed 3D Anaglyphs (the red-blue glasses kind).

I've always been intrigued with ways of creating 3D images. The red-blue glasses kind has been with us for quite some time. I remember that was the way the 1953 thriller "House of Wax" with Vincent Price achieved 3D. It worked quite well. It used a stereo cinema camera with red and blue filters. It was shown with two linked projectors, one showing the left (red) image and one showing the right (blue) image.

What is less well known is that it is possible to make a stereo pair with just one camera. The several images in the DIMENSIONS show taken by me were taken with a single lens camera and then combined in Photoshop coding for left (red), right (blue). The trick of course is to take a sequence of two pictures the width of your eyes apart. I find that the brain is quite tolerant in combing these into a 3D image.

What is less less known is that it is possible to make a stereo pair from a 2D movie. The trick here is to find a movie with a lot of panning shots. You then extract two shots about the width of a pair of eyes from the movie and then combine them as above in Photoshop.

The results are quite dramatic. In part this is due to the brain's tolerance in combining the stereo pairs, but it is also due to the fact that the pan-based extracted images can be emphasized to show depth, in particular, depth extending in front of the picture plane.

So I invite you to stop by the Forum Bookstore this week to see seven examples of pan-based 3D anaglyphs. I think you will find them intriguing also. There are plenty of 3D glasses at the bookstore, so you won't have any trouble viewing them. For those who have not seen the show, there are several other 3D anaglyphs created from sequence-based (or pair-based) images.

For those who would like to view them online, let me know and I'll mail out glasses to the first 10 requests. (That exhausts my current supply. Sorry. They are, of course, available online and at party stores.)

If you can't stop by my show and have glasses you can see these anaglyphs online here at my Flickr account. The URL opens a slideshow of the album with the now familiar "Ken Burns Effect." If you are wearing your glasses, I think you'll be surprised at the 3D Information that can be garnered from a 2D film!

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