Stereophoto


What is a stereophotography?

   By the classical photography you can take quite "true" pictures. But it has some insufficiencies and one of them is that the picture "is flat". Nevertheless we can sense the space and its deepness in reality. We need eyes and the brait for it. Eyes as a sense organ and the brain which "analyse" the view.On the basis of experiences it recognizes know objects and it knows that objects which are in front are bigger than the ones in background. It informs us about the deepness mainly by the different shift of the two views - from the left and right eye. (You can try a small test - put a finger few centimeters before the eyes and look to the distance. You will se probably two fingers). More close the object is, greater shift comes. The object in infinity are on the same place - not shifted. The sterophotography is based on this phonomenon.  

   A stereophotograph consists of the photographs - one for each eye taken from different places. The it must be ensured in a viewer or by another technique that each eye watches its photo and the brain prepares the deepness illusion then. The pictures are plastic and more realistic.

How to take stereophotographs?

   There are five possibilities:

  1. A Stereocamera - a special type of camera that has two lens and synchronized shutter. This is the best way, enabling to take photos with moving objects.
  2. Stereoconvertor - it is possible to put a convertor in front of the lens that mixes the picture from two apertures. It is principally nearly the stereocamera, but there can be a problem with focusing - usually the middle of the picture is used, but in this case it is a border area on left and right image.
  3. Two identical cameras, which are located side by side.Usually it is not possible to synchronize the shooters, so you can take one picture by one camera and the second one by the second camera. The scene cannot be changed meanwhile.
  4. Special tripod - with two positions. We put the camera on the first position, take the picture and move it to the second position and take the second picture. Only static pictures can be taken.
  5. From the hand - to take a picture of static scene, we don't need anything else except of the camera and a little bit experience. We take the first picture and than we move the camera by the distance of our eyes and take the second camera. The lens axes in both positions should be parallel.
    The quality of the pictures taken by this technique is usualle worse, because we can do following mistakes.
    1. We move the camera by wrong distance - if it is too small, the picture is too flat, on the other hand if it is too great, the deepness is unreally great or we are not able to see the whole deepness, but we can "focus" only part of it.
    2. The axes are not parallel - that means we take a little different views. The infinite background should not be changed.
    3. Vertical shift or rotation - if we move the camera not only horizontally, but verically too. Or we rotate the picture a little bit - this mistake can be fixed in a graphical editor, but the are of the picture decreases then.
    4. Different exposition - when we are changing the position of the camera, we have to take care of the light and flares, the same exposition time...

I can say from my experiences that I have tried techniques 2-5, but most often I take the pictures from the hand. Event it is not perfect, the brain can correct little mistakes and you will usually not realize anything. The bigges disadvantage is the limitation for the static pictures. Some of the cameres (for example and older Olympus Camedia C300) have the function 2 in 1. I fine to use it and to check the pictures on the display imediatelly.

How to view such pictures?

If you take diapositeves, you can make a viewer for simply pushing the pictures in.

You can combine the two pictures by a special computer's application and mask one view by red color and the second by blue color. Than you need special red-blue glasses to view it. This technique is called anaglyphs and it is described below.

You can learn to see such pictures without any aid - squint the picture by the right way. Just simply watch one picture by the left eye and the second one by the right eye :-) The same technique is necessary to see the stereograms (SIRDS). The distance of the pictures must not be greater than the distance of the eyes - that is approximatelly 7 cm. The novices should start with lesser distance.

Few samples
Vysoké Tatry Vysoké Tatry Vysoké Tatry, cestou na Kriváň
Vysoké Tatry, cestou na Kriváň Vysoké Tatry, Malá Studená dolina Vysoké Tatry, Popradské pleso
Vysoké Tatry, pohled z Velké Svišťovky na Černé a Zelené pleso Adršpašské skály, brána do skalního města Mladečské jeskyně
Svatý Kopeček u Olomouce Kuks - sochy neřestí Kuks - park u hospitálu
Leknín, ZOO Lešná Magnolie, Čechovy sady v Olomouci Žirafče v ZOO Lešná. Jen málo zvířat vám postojí, a nepohne se :)

Links

Other techniques

A stereofotography is just one of many techniques that can enhance the possibilities of the classical photography. Maybe you are familiar with some of them, so here is just a brief list of some of them:

Stereograms - are based on the same principle as the stereophotography, but is is not a photography, but an image created by the computer, based on 3D model and a texture. There is number of stripes of the texture deformed by the deepness of the model in each point. The plastic images rises from the wallpaper. For more information visit Stereograms pages.

Anaglyphs - are photograps put over itselft to one photograph. Every photo is masked by different color and you need special glasses to see it. Zoner Photo Studio can be used for example to create such pictures.
Svět na dlani - galeries and glasses sale, camera convertors and others. (Czech only)

Panoramatic pictures - a wide-spread technique nowadays which allows to combine several neighbouring pictures to one large panoramatic picture. Special software  for the creating is usually delivered with the camera. It is necessary to use it, as it is not possible only to compound the pictures manually, because of the len's distortion.
Photovista panorama

spherical panorama- pictures are not projected to cylinder only, but to the sphere and we can look in any direction in the space.

Plenoptic modeling - So far described techniques allowed to watch the scene from one place. Plenoptic modeling brings the possibility to take the scene from several places and to "walk" between them. The tripod, exact position maping and special software is required. It is quite difficult to prepare it, but it allows to show any view from any place in the scene.
McMilan's abstract

3D models from fotographs - a technique, which is suitable for by man created object, not for natural ones. It helps when we want to show already existing building in 3D. We take the picures of it from different places and we create its simple 3D model with the computer by the way that we put the basis geometric object on the taken pictures. Based on the pictures the software creates the textures then and it hides the imperfection of the rough 3D model, so it is not necessary to create perfec model with texture in 3DStudio for example.
Canoma

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