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Curious-looking rig draws glances – and questions
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Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
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| Posted by: Emory Schley |
9/28/2007 4:56 AM |
Last weekend, my wife and I traveled over to Rainbow Springs to attend the sixth annual Marion County Springs Festival activities held there. It was a beautiful autumn day though it was actually the final day of summer. Crowds were out in abundance, and every parking space in the park was filled, with still more cars having to park along both sides of the roadway leading out of the park.
As I usually do when I go to Rainbow Springs, I took my camera rig with me. I call it a camera rig because it’s actually two digital cameras mounted on an aluminum bracket with an electronic flash secured above them. Wires go from a controller to each camera and to the flash unit. The cameras are in a side-by-side configuration and are both aimed in the same direction.
Generally, when people see me carrying this thing around, they kind of do a double-take, when they notice that “the rig” contains two cameras. “What is that for – taking automatic back-up photos?” some will ask, and others will say something like “That must be the ultimate fail-safe system. Two shots for the price of one,” or some such remark.
I patiently explain to those who inquire that the rig is designed to take stereo photos, and for that you need two photos to be taken at the same time. The controller unit doesn’t really synchronize the cameras as one might think, but it samples the video signal from each camera, compares the two readings, and reports on its LCD display the degree of synchronization in effect at the moment. The sync drifts over time, so the constant monitoring by the controller is essential in getting good stereo shots. The controller also ensures that the flash, when used, only goes off when both shutters are fully open. If you want to take a shot of something, a glance at the display tells you how tight the synchronization is at that moment, in tenths of a second, hundredths, thousandths, or ten-thousandths of a second, as the case may be. For flash, you need a closer sync than is needed for a non-flash picture. If there is action going on that you want to record, then a higher degree of sync is needed for that as well.
I got some pretty decent shots at Rainbow Springs, but I’m still trying to work out the best methods to use to capture really breath-taking shots, in glorious color AND 3-D!
If you’d like more information on the subject, you can go to www.ledametrix.com to get an idea of what’s involved in the process. You’ll also find some outstanding 3-D stills and pretty decent 3-D movies there, as well as links to other sites dealing with various phases of the stereo art. |
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Re: Curious-looking rig draws glances – and questions |
By Ray Cates on
9/29/2007 7:57 PM |
| This is not a very exciting piece of writing. I would just as soon hear about how your keyboard keys sound, or maybe how water goes down your drain at home and at work. |
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