Single-camera experience

[P3D Rubén Torrejón <RUBEN10219@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all!

Last week-end I had the opportunity to visit the city of Salamanca and its
environments, here in Spain. I decided that it would be a perfect occasion
to test 3-D photography with a single camera as the city and its province
is well known for its terrific architecture (convents, cathedrals, statues
...) and the autum gave it an added enchantement. I used my Minolta SRL
without a tripod and the shift between stereo-pairs was also done by hand.
As you may see I did my tests without any special equipment and risks were
very high that my shots wouldn't later match. Even some of the people
coming with me laughed at the idea of getting usable 3-D pairs with such
basic technique. As a back-up and for comparative purposes I also brought
my Image Tech 3D 1000, both cameras were using slide film. I returned on
Sunday and had my slides processed on Monday. I must say that the results
with the Minolta amazed not only me but other people as well. Most of the
slides were hyperstereos of buildings, ranging from churchs to cloisters
or even a cathedral's nave, with the added compositional bonus of trees,
statues, signs, flowers, and even people - not moving of course ( I was
lucky enough to catch a day with no wind at all, and tourists were
scarce). Believe me: Seing the slides in a viewer makes the sentence "is
like being there" true. The 3-D effect is breathtaking and the film used -
my first try with Fuji Provia 100 ASA- gives a perfect tonal range with no
visible grain. All of the friends who have viewed the slides -some of them
professionals working on broadcast TV-  agreed that they liked the
composition and the light but that it was 3-D that added a big deal of
enjoyment to the pictures. An increase in apparent resolution between mono
slides and stereo-pairs was also noticed by them (has any of you
researched this effect?).
I will be projecting the slides very soon to a group of friends, but the
few people that have already seen the pairs were shocked and one of them
is going to try 3-D by himself. Let me point out that most of them ignored
that 3-D photography did even existed as there's an absolute lack of
information about it among the public (I am speaking of Spain, where
things like the Realist are perfectly unknown). There's a lot of
divulgative work that should be done (beginning by ourselves, I'm affraid)
to spread the knowledge on 3-D photography. I plan to purchase an RBT
camera (Hi Jon!) in the near future, but my recent experiment has
demonstrated to me that even a single SRL can give truly wonderful results
with little planning. 
By the way, the pictures taken with the ImageTech camera exhibited a
lacklustre quality when compared with full frame pairs taken with my SRL
and a good lens. Half-frame slides appeared soft, grainy (Kodak Elite 200)
and the reduced stereo-base (combined with the odd aspect ratio) limited
the subjects with whom I could use the camera to close-ups and portraits.

Regards from Spain!


Ruben
RUBEN10219@xxxxxxxxxxx


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