The Stereo Photographer

Alternate Frame Whatnow?

2010-04-30T23:49:00.000-07:00

Alternate frame sequencing is the fancy name for quickly flipping between two images.
In an earlier post I mentioned that I wrote my own alternate frame sequencer that I call the Flipper; unfortunately I gave no explanation on how to use it.
The flipper is currently in beta and thusly is subject to change.
In any case, the current implementation is a web-only version that can be interacted with through the frame-rate slider (along the left edge) and by passing in URL parameters.
The flipper has three parameters it knows about:

image1
image2
fps

The order of the parameters doesn't matter.
image1 and image2 need to be fully qualified URLs to either JPG or PNG assets, while fps is the number of "flips" per second (default is 15).
Fully qualified URLs look like this: http://blakebarrett.net/flipper/IMG_0897.JPG
The URL to the flipper is http://blakebarrett.net/flipper/flipper.html
A full flipper request looks like this:
http://blakebarrett.net/flipper/flipper.html?image1=http://blakebarrett.net/flipper/IMG_0897.JPG&image2=http://blakebarrett.net/flipper/IMG_0898.JPG&fps=15

If no parameters are passed in, it defaults to the pair of images of me in my living room which are the images referenced above.

Click here to open flipper in a new window.

What is a Stereogram?

2010-03-18T22:56:00.001-07:00

The above image is what is known as a parallel stereo pair. Believe it or not, you probably have seen something like this before advertised under the name ViewMaster. ViewMasters are a modern incarnation of what is officially called a stereoscope. Stereoscopes have been around for over a hundred years and are widely used today in the field of microscopy. The Wikipedia article on stereoscopes is quite informative.

The trick to "free-viewing" image pairs like this is to pick a common point on each and try focusing "through" it. The two images will merge and you will begin to see three. While the outer two will be semi-transparent the middle one will be fully visible and 3D! This technique is different from crossing your eyes; that requires what is known as a cross-eyed stereo-pair.

There is another type of stereogram called Anaglyphs. These most commonly have one color blocked out for one of the images and another color blocked out for the other (usually red and blue). These are what most "3D Movies" usually are. Unfortunately, viewing this type of stereogram requires special color filtering glasses, like this:
The downside to the common red/cyan stereogram is that you lose quite a bit of color of the original images and your brain has to fill in the blanks. One way stereo technology has improved in this area are what's known as linearly polarized anaglyphs -- that is the method they employed in the movie "Avatar".

The final type of stereogram I want to mention is what is sometimes referred to as a wigglegram. This is done by taking two images and rapidly switching between the two, like this:

What is a Stereo Photographer?

2010-03-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

Someone who takes two photographs at a time.
Stereo imagery is very similar to stereo audio; but instead of two distinct audio sources there are two distinct sources of imagery.