DIY - How to Make 3D Pictures

Thursday, 5 April 2012

Simply put, a three dimensional picture can be made by combining two pictures from slightly different angles. The pictures should be parallel to each other and about your eyes width apart. Then combining them in such a way that your right eye sees the right picture and your left eye sees the left. Your brain will automatically visualize a three dimensional image.

This can be done with shaded picture colors and shaded glasses, polarized glasses, crossing your eyes and alternating images.

So i went out in the back yard and took some pictures of a flower, from about a foot away, moving the camera about 6" between each shot.


Anaglyph 3DI decided to try the Red/Cyan method for creating the 3D image. I was hoping to find those old paper glasses in a box in the basement, but when Karrie and i were at the Dollar Store i saw a pair and just bought them.

There are different ways of creating the final picture. You can combine the pictures in Adobe Photoshop. Making Two layers and Screening the first as Cyan and the second as Red, then merging them together. Or you can use one of many free programs online that do all the work for you. I used Anaglyph Maker, it was pretty easy, although there is some alignment and ghosting problems.

I also tried Stereo Photo Maker. It had basically the same features, was a little more complicated, but was more powerful and able to produce better 3D pictures. The same company created Stereo Movie Maker. Where you can combine 2 videos and make a 3D movie. I plan on trying that later.

When i tried to process the first pictures and make them 3D it didn't line up correctly. Here's the two pictures that i took.

The red and cyan should only be slightly apart, as you can see the flower is way off.

That's when i read that you need to vary the distance the camera moves depending on the distance to the object you are photographing. For example if you are very close to your subject, 1 foot away from a flower, just move the camera a few inches. But if you are photographing a building from a hundred feet away then you can move the camera 4"-6". I realized that i had moved the camera too much for how close i was to the flower.

So a few days later i went out in the front yard and took some pictures of my house, varying the distance i moved the camera. I tried moving 2", 4", 6" and 8". The two pictures below were the best of those shots. Both of them were when i only moved the camera 2". Even from this distance, when i moved the camera too much the images didn't line up as well.

I then went to the backyard again and tried to take a picture of the same flower, this time not moving the camera as much, maybe an inch. It came out better but still not perfect. This time i could get the flower itself to appear as if it's coming out of the screen, but everything in the background did not line up. As you can see how far the two fence posts are apart.



The same problem with the next picture. I could either get the background or foreground to align but not both together. I guess i could have used Photoshop and double processed the image where i aligned each part then combined them.



So i had to find something that would not move at all, and i found the perfect thing, Charlie.

These pictures came out the best of all of them. It helped that it had a flat walled background.



Wiggle 3D
I was using the Rec/Cyan method for looking at the pictures but there are other ways to create the 3D effect. This is the "wiggle" gif method.

It's basically like 2 frames of a movie where your brain interprets the 3 dimensions.


Stereoscope 3D
There is the stereoscopic, side-by-side method, which puts the images on opposite sides of the corresponding eyes next to each other. Then you have to look at the picture cross-eyed and there should be the 3D image in the middle. When i first tried it, it hurt my eyes. But those weird "hidden image" posters that came out 10 years ago use this same method.

It should work but i'm not sure, i can't get my eyes to cross right.


PhotoFly 3D
Similar to the Wiggle gif method but it combines many pictures to create an actual 3D model of the area. It can be used as points in AutoCAD or to create videos like in the post i wrote about earlier.

Here's one of those videos.

http://youtu.be/SKTYUFm0hXg

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Macro Photography - Leaf Closeups

Sunday, 26 February 2012

I was experimenting the other day with close-up photos, using different camera settings, of water on a banana leaf. Here's some of the results.





And here are some similar pictures i took a few years ago while i was working in the woods of West Virginia, Kentucky and Jackson Michigan.

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DIY - Infrared Camera Filter

Thursday, 23 February 2012

While reading about making the ND filter i saw instructions on making an Infrared filter for your camera. The ND filter used a piece of welding glass to "dim down" the amount of light that enters the camera. With a IR filter you need something that only allows infrared light to enter the camera. I had an old camera that i never use because the lens is kind of scratched, so it was perfect to try this out with.

The infrared wavelength is just longer than is visible to the human eye. In fact visible light is only a small part of the light spectrum.

Far infrared is used in thermal imaging cameras. Heat given off by objects is in the far infrared spectrum of light.

The pictures i would be taking would not show this kind of thermal imaging, just the light from the Near Infrared.

Simply put, i wanted to remove the piece of glass that blocks infrared light, then add exposed film which ONLY allows infrared light into the camera.

First, the hard part. Camera's have a tiny piece of glass between the lens and the sensor which blocks infrared light from passing through. I wasn't sure i would be able to remove it but i did. It's the broken pieces of red tinted glass at the bottom right.
And even more surprising is that i was able to put the camera back together the first time and it still worked.

Now that infrared light can pass to the camera's sensor i needed a way to block the visible light. Online there was a lot of different ways that people said this could be done but the cheapest and easiest way looked to use a piece of film negative and an old floppy disc.

And i tried part of an old floppy disc.

Here are the pieces from the exposed and unexposed processed film.

I was planning on mounting the film on a PVC filter like i had done before. In hindsight that probably would have been a good idea. So i started to making a fitting out of PVC like before. But then i saw that the best way to do it was to cut the film and glue it in place INSIDE of the camera, right in front of the sensor. So i ended up not using this.

But before i did that i needed to know what is the best material to use. I decided to experiment with all of the ways people suggested to block the visible light. Here were the 3 pieces that i would be testing.
The material and the results from the test: (click images to enlarge)

1. Film negative that had been exposed to light

2. Film negative that had not been exposed to light

3. Floppy disc

The floppy disc over the lens made the picture come out so dark that it wasn't usable. I could have left the shutter open for a much longer time, similar to the ND filter, but i decided just not to use it. So i moved on to layering two pieces of material together.

5. Two pieces of film negative that had been exposed to light

6. 2 pieces of film negative that had not been exposed to light

7. 1 piece of exposed and 1 piece of unexposed film negative

It turned out that the best result was the last one i tested, 1 piece of exposed and 1 piece of unexposed film negative.

I took a couple of pictures in the backyard and liked how they came out. This picture is the original, right out of the camera.

This is after adjusting the colors in Photoshop.

Now here's the bad part. When i finally decided what to use i took the camera apart again and glued in the 2 pieces over the sensor.



Then when trying to put the camera back for the 4th time i damaged the small ribbon cable from the lens to the circuit board. You can kind of see the tiny hole in the orange cable.

It's a bit of a bummer, not that i would have used this camera a lot but it would have been fun to experiment with.

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Have you seen this man?

Police have just released the photo of a man wanted for murder and theft of undisclosed military information. The photo, seen here, was taken from a security camera at the crime scene. Later the same man was seen at an LA Dodgers game. His identity is still unknown.
He is also believed to be the same man linked to a series of convenience store robberies from 2008.
If you know him or his whereabouts please contact the United States Government immediately.

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ND Filter at Lake Erie

Monday, 6 February 2012

On the drive home from Cincinnati i pulled off I-75 at a Exit 5 near the Consumers Energy power plant where i had been working a lot this summer. There's a small parking lot where you can walk to Lake Erie. I've taken some pictures there before when the lake level was way down. I was still a little bummed out with some of the pictures i took in Tennessee, using my homemade ND filter.
I made an ND filter for my camera from a piece of welding glass, but when i took pictures of the rivers and Laural Falls i forgot to set my camera to RAW. That means that i had to spend a long time in Photoshop and the pictures still never turned out very good, the colors were all off.

So i walked along Lake Erie and took around 25 pictures. The exposure times ranged between 4 and 15 seconds. I couldn't really tell by looking at my camera how well they turned out because with the welders glass they all had a green tint to them. Here's what they looked like directly out of the camera.
But when i got home and processed them with Photoshop i was really happy. This time they turned out much better.

This one i converted to black and white.
Here is just a normal photo i took with the ND filter not on.
The ND filter allows you to open the lens for a much longer time then you would normally be able to, creating a glassy effect on the water.
This picture is definitely my favorite.

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