Expo19-3D
Posted on 06/03/11 by nertHere’re the success stories from the 3D camera rig over the Expo weekend, in anaglyph mode (requires red/cyan 3D glasses, other colours or cinema glasses won’t cut the proverbial mustard):
and eyebending-autostereogram mode (sit back, dead centre and level to picture, cross eyes until each side overlaps in the middle, relax and your eyes should focus eventually, takes practice but no glasses!):
Yeah there’s one that only has a red/cyan version, turns out holding the camera at a 45-degree angle does HORRIBLE THINGS to your eyes in autostereogram, who’d have thought? :p The red/cyan version sort of ish works, the effect is there anyway.
So how did it fare? Not so bad, not so great, a bit of both. In my brief tests the differences between the two cameras (450d and 550d) weren’t enough to cause problems – resizing the larger picture to match the smaller worked just fine. In practice, something else is up; the 450d is delivering darker images with more shadows and sharper backgrounds, while the 550d consistently manages lighter shadows and a slight orange-reddish tint to everything in comparison.
Now whether this is at least partly due to the 450d’s lens having been dropped is uncertain. The lens only closes up to 2.8 and even that’s a case of the lens will close in smaller increments up until that point, whether it’s accurately that value is uncertain – though eyeballing it, it looks to be true. Taking a few pictures at home and matching the sharpness up it seems going to f/3.5 on the 550d brought the closest match to the 450d’s new f/2.8 max (just to be clear, it’s the broken lens’s max, the camera itself is fine).
I’ve managed to clear up most of the issues in post, but not much can fix the difference in bokeh. Luckily the human brain is pretty damned smart and many of us already have differences between our eyes that it compensates for without anyone but our optician noticing. Thus most of the time it doesn’t affect the final result much, but it’s unideal. I’ll have to do more testing, try swapping lenses and so on. PITA :P
Still, it was a fun experiment, the 3D rig got a lot more people talking to me than I’m used to and it is a fun gimmick to wave around. Despite the fact it’s made of doorframe, ducttape and homemade wiring, while one lens is wrapped in yellow PVC tape to designate its borkedness, people still seem to generally go LOOK OUT, ITS A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER! QUICK, EVERYONE VOGUE!
Any sufficiently advanced (looking) technology is indistinguishable from magic, as they say!