A little background. Many a years ago, maybe 30, I was into stereo photography. I had a Revere camera that shot 3D slides. Film processed and inserted into special mounts and viewed with a special viewer. At one time I had a Nimslo camera that produced 3D prints using a lenticular lamination process.
I recently discovered an App that lats me shoot stereo photos with my Android phone and it’s opened up a new world of possibilities. The apps pro version is less than $3 and works fairly well. 3DSteroidPro. Only been using it for two days and now I’ve bought a device that takes 3D photos, but also 3D movies! You need a special headset to view the movies, but if the device works well, I can see getting that in a few weeks.
There’s a Reddit group that you might find interesting. r/CrossView and r/Xreal are two I’ve found.
I saw someone fooling around with a stereo camera dongle that attached to a phone. Don’t know what software he was using. Not having seen the final results, don’t know if the resulting images were “professional quality”, though miniature devices really have been rapidly improving in this regard.
I’ve been taking hyperstereo images for years by using my regular camera or cell phone and moving about five feet between shots. This amplifies the depth feeling. All I have to do is print the images out. I have a collection of 3D viewers I can use, or I can use the “cross-eye” viewing method.
I met a retired Optics scientist at this month’s local section Optica meeting who invented an app that lets you take two separated images with your cell phone, then it arranges them side by side, and you use a special plastic viewer that has lenses for each eye the appropriate distance away.
But you really don’t need any special equipment, aside from possibly a viewer, as I noted above.
Regarding Hyper Stereo, I took some shots at Niagara falls with my Revere. They were taken about 5 or 6 feet apart. As you mentioned it makes everything look small. The falls looks about 3 feet high. Unfortunately the Maid of the Mist refused to cooperate, but other than that it looked fine.
I’m expecting my Xbeam Pro tomorrow and looking forward to more fun. I’ll bet it would be neat to do a stereo movie from my drone.
Back when I was in college in the 1980s, a friend flew me over the campus in his small plane while I took pictures using a motor-drive 35mm still camera. I only realized after the fact that that meant I had lots of stereo pairs.
When I had the photos printed, I selected a bunch of pairs and arranged them in an album aligned for cross-eyed viewing. It worked pretty well, especially considering I hadn’t even thought of the idea before shooting.
A now-deceased relative of mine was an inventor and invented a stereoscopic camera. Now I’m sure he didn’t invent THE stereoscopic camera but obviously had a hand in some unique feature of whatever this version of the camera was. Anyway, when I was kid he showed me the colour images he took around London back in the 1950s and 60’s. I’ve never seen imagery that brought a historic scene to life so convincingly - the quality was so good and the image just popped. It felt like I was standing in the scene.
So thanks for posting this thread because I’m going to try to find out what happened to that camera!
I tried my hand at it, back in the day when digital photography for the masses was new. I didn’t use any special equipment, though, just moved the camera between shots.
Sir Brian Harold May (you may know him as the guitarist for Queen) is a big fan of stereoscopic photography. He has published several gorgeous books on the subject that come with his “Owl” 3-D viewer. His most recent, Stereoscopy: The Dawn of 3-D was published in 2021
I bought a Nimslo 3D camera when they first came out. With its lenticular pictures, it seemed like a good solution to 3D photography without using a viewer. It was probably - no, definitely - me as the photographer who didn’t quite achieve the spectacular effects as advertised. The processing was costly and slow, and eventually unavailable. Sigh.
Years go by, and at a antique show I came across a wooden box with about 50 glass stereo slides. I could tell they were old, in black-and-white, somewhere with mountains and snow. After buying them on a lark, I found a paper inside that said they were from Germany around 1910. (You can find similar glass stereo slides from that period on eBay.)
I found a reasonably priced Verascope 3D viewer (again on eBay) so I could finally view them. They’re fascinating in that you can more realistically see people from that time period and location, which with my slides turned out to be farners in Bavaria before WWI.
The thing I find amazing is when looking at them, I’m the only person in the world with access to these slides, since they were direct exposures without negatives. If I drop and break a glass slide, that history and memory is gone forever. Scary and a little sad.
There’s a lecture tonight about 3D stereograms at the Charles River Museum of Industry and innovation in Waltham MA. I’ve got my ticket. And my anaglyphic glasses.