While playing with FlickrAPI, we came up with a cool way of exploring the Flickr interestingness. It quickly became an addiction. You can view it here, we hope you will enjoy it as much as we do.

Finally, with some delay, we continue with our series of articles about the making of our website.

One of the objectives of the panorama scene was to capture as much information as possible. So besides capturing the scene itself we captured the motion of the subjects in the scene by creating a stop motion panorama. By shooting in stereo (with two camera’s instead of one) we also captured the depth in the scene.

Package with Loreo 3D Lens In A Cap in it

I started experimenting with stereo photography in December last year when I first bought a 3D lens in a cap from Loreo. A Hong Kong based company that manufactures some unusual photo accessories. This lens was great fun experimenting with, but has some serious drawbacks by design. First off it’s fairly cheap, so the quality of the lens is quite low. Secondly you can only shoot in portrait mode with a very small field of view.

Picture taken with the Loreo 3D-lens-in-a-cap

A far better way of capturing stereo imagery is by using two identical camera’s outfitted with identical lenses. That’s the solution we opted for. Mark owned a Canon 350D and I was already wanting to buy an DSLR for a long time, so decided to buy the same. So maybe it wasn’t the latest DSLR technology available but since this model had already been replaced with a newer one it was actually a bargain.

The two cameras were mounted on a tripod with an adjustable distance bar, allowing to slide the camera’s closer or further apart from each other depending on the desired effect. We synchronized the two shutters by using two sets of RF remote controls dialed in on the same channel. That way we could fire the two shutters simultaneously with one remote control.

For ease of production we decided to shoot us and the panorama separately. The Amsterdam panorama shoot presented quite a few challenges. Since we wanted a very dynamic scene with lots of movement we had to do the shoot during a busy time of the day. Add to that the fact that we had to stand in the middle of the bridge, forcing cars and vans to drive past our tripod with just a few inches of clearance and you’re starting to get an idea of the difficulty of the task. See, since we were going to add us in the scene later on we had to make sure no objects or people would appear at the spot we’re supposed to stand, forcing us to wait for an object to clear that area before continuing our circle. But at the same time we needed to keep a constant interval between the 144 frames to avoid people and moving objects to suddenly warp ahead in time.

The second shoot of us was way less stressing. We had purchased a green screen fabric from EEFX a few months before and asked photographers Géraldine Jeanjean & Ringel Goslinga to help us out with the lighting. Instead of moving the camera’s around us, requiring a green room rather then just a green screen, it is actually us that are rotating by 2.5° for each frame. Notice the printed circle on the floor which we used as reference to position our feet.

At this point I would like to point out that we had no budget to produce this website and therefore chose for the DIY approach and took a lot of shortcuts. If we were to do this with sufficient budget the end result could be really polished and consistent throughout. Yes, for the ones that noticed; correct camera perspective, consistent lighting etc.

Also, stereo photography is way more complicated then it initially looks. There are quite a few things to take into account, some of them we have omitted. However, the intention is to produce new panorama’s for the website in the future, so we’ll have some more opportunities to improve our stereo photography.

Next post I’ll write about what to do with those stereo images. How do you turn them into images that can be viewed with those fancy retro 3D glasses? And we’ll be sharing some code on how to render Papervision3D in anaglyph.