I purchased a used Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D camera and have started experimenting with it. I have my first grainy #anaglyph and #stereocard of one of my favourite subjects, #Klohecat. I’m hoping for lots of sunny days before the snow flies to practise outdoors.
If you have some red/cyan glasses handy you’ll see the above image works okay.
I’ll need to research and test the best size to use for stereocards. Many of the old images are side-by-side “squares”, and I have seen some wider images. The example above has each image too wide to work easily. There are card holders to help with viewing, and with practice you can even just hold up stereocard images and let your eyes merge them into 3D (yay brain!). I can usually accomplish this using the Free Viewing technique (#1 below), but for the image pair above the second method, cross-eyed viewing, seems to work best. The resulting 3D image is backwards, though, with Klohe seeming to be leaning away from you.
Compare it to the one below: as well as cropping it a little, I’ve also reversed the right and left images. Now with the cross-eyed method, Klohe looks correct with her head leaning towards you.
Click on any of the images above to see larger versions.
Notes on the practicalities of viewing side by side images
- Free-viewing. Try to defocus your eyes so that they look straight ahead, with lines of sight parallel, as if viewing MagicEye photos. You may see 3 images; if so concentrate on the central image, which should appear in 3D. This method is easiest for smaller images, say less than 120mm width.
- Cross eyed viewing is a variation on free-viewing where the images are deliberately transposed right to left and left to right. Raising a finger halfway between the image and your eyes then focusing on the tip of your finger will cross your eyes. The images will be out of focus so if you then move your finger towards the images concentrating on the finger tip the images can be brought into focus and merge.
- from “Viewing Stereoscopic Images” on The Stereocopic Society website.