3D macro photography

May 6, 2009 11:27 AM

Brian Valentine takes 3D macro images of flowers and insects. (How do I view them?) He discusses his macro methods here; a more general guide for making your own (not necessarily macro) 3D images can be found here. More 3D goodness at the Flickr Stereophotography (and stereovideography!) pools. Via EMRJKC'94.

Also, here's a bug in spinning 3D.

posted by Upton O'Good (32 comments total)

Ouch.
posted by HumanComplex at 11:32 AM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

pretty.. but oh god the head ache.
posted by selenized at 11:33 AM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Ow.
posted by Artw at 11:36 AM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Great idea, but for some reason it isn't working for me. The sample girl on the instruction page merged instantly. I guess my eyes are only good for cartoons anymore.
posted by DU at 11:40 AM on May 6, 2009

How to view stereograms, or you can print these and make a stereoscope.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:44 AM on May 6, 2009

Neato!
posted by eyeballkid at 11:54 AM on May 6, 2009

I can't make my eyes cross like that, so I made the flower image into an anaglyph image and used my red-blue glasses. The stereo seemed off to me for the side petals, like the stereo separation was too great. I wish he had these as separate images so I could view them more easily.
posted by demiurge at 11:54 AM on May 6, 2009

Cool.
posted by greta simone at 11:55 AM on May 6, 2009

Brilliant! Makes you realise that those 'magic eye' books were lame in comparison to what they could have been.
posted by Sova at 11:56 AM on May 6, 2009

o h gtrea nwo my esey aer boroken
posted by mrt at 11:57 AM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

interesting... keep in mind, folks, that it isn't just crossing your eyes, the angle of your head plays into it as well.... once you have it your eyes seem lock into position (at least mine do) ..

I avoided the bugs...a bit creepy...
posted by HuronBob at 12:17 PM on May 6, 2009

This is good.

I literally laughed out loud when it first clicked into 3D. With delight. That is so frickin' cool.

It's also a wee bit painful. And it takes a while for your eyes to go back to normal. I worry that if I looked at a lot of these it would take hours for me to see straight again. Or is that just me?
posted by y6y6y6 at 12:26 PM on May 6, 2009

On behalf of the oppressed amblyopic peoples of the world, I decry the stereonormativity of this post.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:33 PM on May 6, 2009 [2 favorites]

Really great--thanks, Upton O'Good!
posted by MrMoonPie at 12:50 PM on May 6, 2009

Nice stuff.

It's also a wee bit painful.

I'm much more comfortable with wall-eye viewing than I am with cross-eye—I can do both, but cross-eye feels like a headache in the making, so, yeah, it sucks that most of this stuff is rendered for cross. But it's still a neat effect to play around with.
posted by cortex at 12:58 PM on May 6, 2009

These images are just too big/far apart for me to get to line up. I can get almost there but my eyes just can't take it. I normally have no problem with stereograms.
posted by zsazsa at 1:01 PM on May 6, 2009

I couldn't do it and now I have a headache. Isn't the Internet fun?
posted by eye of newt at 1:22 PM on May 6, 2009

Well, as a person who finds cross-eye to be extremely easy and wall-eye the opposite, I think this is the bee's knees.
posted by Liver at 1:31 PM on May 6, 2009

These images are just too big/far apart for me to get to line up.

Same here. I find using the Small size of the flickr photo helps.
posted by DakotaPaul at 1:41 PM on May 6, 2009

For cortex and the parallel folks: I don't think there's any in Brian Valentine's photos, but the stereophotography pool has quite a few.
posted by Upton O'Good at 1:48 PM on May 6, 2009

I'm much better at the cross-eyed viewing than the parallel, so thank you for this. I've NEVER been able to see a "magic-eye" poster, but these are like cake. (I learned how to cross my eyes at an early age. class clown ftw!)
posted by not_on_display at 2:16 PM on May 6, 2009

I can only assume my eye problems (3 childhood eye surgeries) prevent me from seeing these very effectively; same goes for Magic Eye stereograms.

Or the high school conspiracy that foisted these things on me back in the 90's has propagated to Metafilter, and you're all conspiring to continue acting like these actually do something.

In which case, I'm on to you fuckers.
posted by empyrean at 2:17 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Crosseye steriograms make so much more sense then the 'look past' type. At least I thought they did, apparently most of you can't hack it. Suckers. They work perfictly for me.

Actually when I was a kid I had trouble coordinating my eyes and actually did this "vision therapy" stuff in order to correct it, because of that I can actually move my eyes almost independently, so I can have one eye crossed and the other one looking forward. I can't get them going in opposite directions or move them independantly in the y-axis, though.
posted by delmoi at 2:20 PM on May 6, 2009

Also, your monitor size (and how far away you are) will have a big impact on whether or not these things work. If you're having trouble, try moving farther away.
posted by delmoi at 2:22 PM on May 6, 2009

this one is really cool. I didn't realize the chandler was in the background until I could see it in 3d. This one is pretty cool.
posted by delmoi at 2:30 PM on May 6, 2009

Horace Rumpole & others who find this hard: What the linked instructions don't mention is that the center image can also look blurry in the course of changing your bi-ocular focal length. And while it might seem impossible to stabilize it among the other images, it does help to tell yourself, "There IS a central image," and focus on it. Then it becomes possible to resolve and stabilize it. And then, the eyes fix themselves in place watching, rather than wandering between multiples, and you're inside. BELIEVE!
posted by gorgor_balabala at 3:20 PM on May 6, 2009

Nice. I've loved these since I was a kid, and it's nice to see the technique seeing more use now. I'll have to try it out some time, although no one I know in real life can actually focus with their eyes crossed, so very much an internet thing...
posted by opsin at 4:28 PM on May 6, 2009

Way back before the internet, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and geeks cowered in laboratories, we used stereograms like these to look at protein structures in 3D on a Sun workstation the size of a small refrigerator. I'm not an X-ray crystallographer but I once tried to crystallize the protein I was working on, which gave me license to wander into the lab with the bestest toys in the whole department. (They had full-color CRT monitors!)

One of the students patiently showed me how to see the 3D images of the molecules they had solved, and I vividly remember the thrill when I finally got it. It's one thing to look at a stereogram of a flower which you've already seen in real life, but it's an astonishing glimpse into the unknown to see a brand new protein structure spring into three-dimensional glory in front of you. He rotated a structure to show me the active site of an enzyme, and by golly it was a deep canyon, then he "flew" in the substrate and the damn thing fit right inside that crevice just like it was supposed to. At the molecular level, function follows form. I just had to laugh in delight at the coolness and rightness of everything: the molecules, the models, and the clever minds and skillful hands that pull back the curtain ever so slightly for a peek at Nature's machinery.
posted by Quietgal at 9:18 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

I wonder if you could use this concept to build a 3D desktop. I don't know how you'd get your mouse cursor to move in the z axis, but it would be very cool. Like Neuromancer or something.
posted by sneebler at 7:15 AM on May 8, 2009

You should take this concept a step further and find a way to intentionally wreck peoples backs as well.
posted by Artw at 7:38 AM on May 8, 2009

I much prefer far-viewing stereo images, so all of these are coming out inside-out. Quite trippy.
posted by Xoder at 7:48 AM on May 8, 2009

I've been playing around with making stereoscopic images recently. My technique isn't too refined, basically just taking pictures with the camera aimed at the same place on an object but from each eye.

I finally got one good result:
here.
my mistake was making the depth of field waaaaaaaay too narrow, so when your eyes tried to focus on something that wasn't at the focal point, it remained blurry, so your eyes just kinda went crazy trying to overcompensate for something that wasn't there. With images that are simple and there is only really one thing to look at, that doesn't seem to be much of a problem, but if they're very busy (such as my desk!), then as you explore the spatial relationships between objects, you'll get very confused!
posted by rubah at 9:17 PM on May 15, 2009