PRESIDENTS REPORT 2010
The year has brought us many archived slides in the folios as members use their digital cameras preferentially. So it was a pleasure for yours truly to get out and about, north of Auckland in December and expose several rolls of film, all on hyper-stereos, at selected beauty spots. Some of these I plan to present at the AGM, all things being equal.
PCL in Karaka St. Auckland, are still selling transparency film although the choice is smaller than BD (Before Digital) and their processing is as good as ever but the one hour service has long gone. I had to wait two whole days for the last lot.
With the advent of 3-D television, it seems likely that people will be replacing their old TVs with 3-D versions in the near future and I do expect well heeled enthusiast to be getting out with linked digital movie cameras to produce their own home 3-D movies. Perhaps we should advertise the presence of the Stereoscopic Society more vigorously to attract these likely newcomers instead of having them form local clubs as often happens with new technological systems. Hands up all those who volunteer to start branches in Palmerston North, Wellington and Christchurch!
Meanwhile, Duncan’s ingenious memory stick folios continue to flourish. Your President still gets crossed computer fingers getting to grips with the ease of changing files on the memory sticks. Copying comment “cards” can get them moved rather than copied—it improves with practice—and time gets wasted sorting out the resulting confusion. Could this be why several members have not contributed to the digital folios? It is definitely optional but contributions are appreciated. Or is it the problems with sequential exposures until reasonably priced twin lens digital cameras come onto the market?
A few tips about sequentials seem appropriate here:—
1. The 1 in 30 rule applies here with a difference. Between exposures, move no more than one thirtieth of the near point distance. Do not converge with wide-angle lenses but convergence with normal and telephoto lenses is in order. It allows one to centre on the same detail in the window for both exposures and thus get full frame 3-D. Any slight keystoning gets straightened up by the Stereo Photo Maker (SPM) program.
2. Do slide the camera along an imaginary (or real) plank, between exposures, to ensure horizontal deviation on screen. Should you move at an angle to the camera base, slope error will have you rotating the images by a similar angle to keep deviation horizontal on screen. Your President has several old images with subjects lying on their sides because the camera was raised or lowered between exposures—instead of sliding it along that plank—thus had to be rotated 90° for good 3-D.
3. Lastly, take say four spaced exposures per image then choose later, which pair of the four gives the most exquisite stereo effect.
Many thanks to John Calcott for his dedicated secretarial work and managing the overseas folios, to Carl for organising folios A & B and to Judy for making her home available for the AGM meeting and Max’s digital show. Eric Scanlen
Many thanks to Max Pow for his excellent special report on digital 3-D as attached.
3D report for AGM 2010
2009 saw the introduction of the first digital 3D camera from a recognised camera manufacturer. Fuji introduced the W1 3D camera (approx $NZ1000.00) and it became quite a hit among 3D photographers around the World. The lens spacing is 77mm, 10 megapixels for left and right images. Carl Watson was our first member to get one and now Dave Bell and I own one. They are very easy to use and it is helped by the free software “Stereo Photo Maker” (SPM) because the files the camera produces are MPO, Microsoft and most other programs do not recognise them where as SPM does. It has not been totally plain sailing. I for one had to send my first camera back as the right-hand lens was not focussing properly and Fuji kindly sent a replacement. The W1 can produce unwanted haze patches, this under certain lighting conditions, bright white cloud; the partial solution is to add borders around the edges of the lens window – I believe Fuji are looking into the matter. The other error on Fuji’s part is placing the flash between the lenses producing an odd, too large shadow that seems to come out of the wall behind any person you may be photographing.
By the middle of 2009 TV manufacturers started promoting 3D Ready TV, which means the screen can handle a flicker rate of 120 Hz and include a couple of 3D glasses. Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, LG and I am sure others, are getting ready to unleash these 3D television sets for the home; this is happening in the USA although late last year the sets were ready but not the sales people, or to put it another way, there was no 3D material that could be used to demonstrate it as I experienced while over there in November 2009. There will be 3D Blu-ray players available for those 3D movies but these as far as I can tell have not been released. Sport is another area where 3D broadcasts are becoming a reality overseas; just how soon all this will arrive in NZ is hard to guess.
Nvidia a graphics card designer has been designing cards for 3D games and they have been looking at the W1 camera; it is the Nvidia graphics card and its software that makes the digital projection at our meetings possible.
Zalman produce a 22” 3D monitor (mainly for games) using inter-leave circular polarized method. Acer have a 15.6" Laptop using a similar system. Both these are ideal for our 3D activities; in-fact in Australia quite a few members of the Sydney Stereo Camera Club have purchased Zalman monitors; in our Society both Carl Watson and John Wattie now have these 22” 3D monitors – SPM can modify 3D files to suit this system. From what I know about the inter-lace system, the screen is divided up into horizontal strips equal to the inter-lace scan; so alternate strips are circular polarized in one direction while the other strips are circular polarized in the opposite direction. Left image uses one direction and right image the other. The screen behaves normally in 2D and is actually a very good computer monitor.
There are two ways of experiencing 3D, you either have to create 3D images or if and when they become available, buy 3D programs.
Digital hand viewers have not evolved to a state where they are as good as film viewers can be and perhaps the best so far is the Cyclopital3D viewer; at $US800.00 this will not be everyone’s choice. It’s well made but for me the pixel size is just too large, apart from that it has excellent fully coated achromatic lenses, each eye 800 x 480 resolution, and large image size. Other viewing methods include lenticular that do not need any glasses to view; they are small screen panels and with restrictive viewing positions for 3D and are not ideal.
The computer screen seems the most practical way at the moment with either a PokeScope, a prism device that is held up to the eye, or a mirror type such as the ScreenScope, a hand-held viewer for the computer screen; the mirror type is for me the best. Both these methods use L&R side by side on the screen so the image in effect is half the width of the screen; for this reason, a Zalman monitor, where L&R cover the same area of the screen is much larger. Perhaps the only down side of the Zalman screen is the horizontal lines that can be seen and the half vertical resolution of the screen, this is a result of the inter-lace scanning.
If you have not seen Avatar, the movie, in 3D you should, it is very well done both as a story and 3D. The movie is quite wonderful and when the projectors are adjusted properly the 3D is most natural and just adds to the film, the forest scenes are simply amazing. I have seen it in a Dolby 3D theatre and the very large IMAX theatre. For me the IMAX was much better, both in brightness and colour. Projectors were properly adjusted. The Dolby theatre was too dark and the colours were not good also the projectors were badly adjusted with foreground often cut off at the 3D window.
So it looks as if we are in for a heck of a 3D ride for a while.
The two folios that we have, NZA and NZB, are now both film and digital. Not everyone who receives these folios partake of the digital section, images are stored on a USB storage stick, but those who do, produce some excellent images, thanks to Stereo Photo Maker, a freeware program, that allows aligning (mounting, yes they still use the term) the images. It is recommended that the images are saved both in Parallel and Crossed. I know it is hard for some to change over from film to digital and I assume this is partly due to viewing the digital images. Those who want to try, and who own a digital camera, can try the cha-cha method and then after aligning (mounting) free view the side-by-side images on your computer screen using either cross-eyed or parallel method. In parallel, you may need to reduce the size until 3D is experienced; SPM is all you need and can be down loaded at http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/
Film processing has doubled in price over the last three years and may eventually price itself off the market for the home user. PCL, a processing lab in Auckland, told me that the fall in film has levelled off and risen slightly recently but it can only be for a while as costs will dictate.
The ISU CODE –folio seems to expand at each round as more societies join and it is hoped better standards of mounting are observed; a few have not been conscientious in getting all their 3D images adjusted correctly, fortunately NZ is not one of them.
Max Pow – 7 March 2010
|
