In Red Blue Green: January 2014

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Xtreme Winter Concert, December '12

First time I ever tried concert photos, and the 50mm 1.8 holds up swimmingly. Unfortunately, my 8.1MP Canon XT.....not so much

3D Gifs

In the past few months I have done some exploration in 3D gifs.

A gif is a type of image file that actually consists of many frames (images) playing on a loop at set intervals. For example, most animated ads you see are gif. files.
A unique way to use this is to take a photo of a specific object, and then move the camera ever so slightly to the side and taking another photo, making sure the object is still centered. This replicates retinal disparity, which is how our brain judges depth perception by analyzing the differences in the images from our eyes. When you take the two photos, each photo simulates what is coming from your left and right eye.
For example...

Left

And

Right

Here you can see a simulated left and right eye view, respectively, of a mouth-watering bowl of chocolate goodness. When viewing them separately, you can't really tell much of a difference.
BUT..

Photoshop has this neat thing where you can turn layers into an animation, and loop (repeat) them.
So putting them together and looping them, we get this...

It's not perfect, but the effect is given.

The fact that the image is a little too shaky and not smooth enough is due to the fact that they are 1) two handheld shots and only guesstimated, and 2) there actually isn't a perfect focal point because both photos are not perfectly centered. Yet it still looks pretty cool. You can see that the areas near the focal point (on some pebble) hardly move at all. While other areas (background and foreground) move a great deal. This is exactly what happens in your eyes.
This is a legit link to an in depth (no pun intended) explanation of retinal disparity and other ways we perceive depth.

Okay enough science, here's a few more I made of the same photo set. (Click to see full-size images)