3D-101

 I realise with the potential audience this blog may one day get that I’m preaching to the converted. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already a practising stereographer, or at the very least understand the mechanics of it. But if this blog happens to be your introduction to the world of 3D, I don’t want you to be left behind, so that’s what this article is about. I’ll probably return to this every so often as I think of more important things that need to be known to the 3D beginner. ‘3D 102’ will be taught over the next few months across different articles on a few of the more complicated things around stereoscopy and the techniques I use. But for right now, this is all beginner friendly!

Stereoscopy can be a little intimidating to get into. How do you take the photos? How do you process them? How do you look at them in 3D? Like the word ‘stereoscopy,’ it sounds more complicated than it actually is, and it’s easier now than ever to try this out for yourself. You need three things to make stereos and be able to see them properly, but thankfully they’re all very easy to find and we’ll break them down here:

1. A camera, because it’s a lot easier to take photos with them than an orange.

2. Stereo format software, which you can get for free on your phone and PC.

3. A 3D viewer, which nowadays is remarkably cheap.

Using the camera

Thankfully, stereoscopy doesn’t really require anything special. You can get away quite happily with taking shots on your phone or a cheap camera. The slight downside for the first-time stereographer is that shooting stereos is double the effort than regular photography. Literally, it’s all about taking two pictures instead of one. But they can’t just be any old two pictures, they have to be taken in a straight line, one after the other. We call this sequential stereoscopy and this graphic from the 3DSteroid app shows how to do it.

Other people have better explanations for how to do this, but I’ll give it a shot. Think of it like this: hold the camera as you would normally, but then lock your arms in place. They’re not moving at all. Then, move your hips to your left, which sets you into position to take the first shot. After that, move your hips to the right, which will create enough distance for the second shot. Something to keep in mind is that you want to keep the camera straight as you move. You may be tempted to twist it around to give more depth, but all that’ll do is make it harder for your brain to fuse the two images together and give you a bad case of strained eyes.

Why does it need to be completely straight? Because when you’re looking at them in 3D, the two images, with all the details in them, are fusing together to create the illusion of depth, and that happens horizontally, i.e. left to right. So if, say, you shot a tree, you’re able to see it as 3D because every bit of one shot lines up with where it is in the other, like this:

If, however, the shots are wonky and don’t line up because the camera is angled weirdly or it’s not formatted right, they’ll hurt your eyes when you try to see them in 3D, like this:

When you first get into stereoscopy, there are a few confusing technicalities and terms like ‘parallax’ and ‘baselines’ which can make it scary to attempt it. Honestly, a lot of how to take stereos becomes muscle memory after you start trying it. The best way to describe it is that each of the two pictures should represent a view from one of your eyes. If you alternate closing your eyes while focusing on something, you’ll see a lot of little difference in how what’s in front of you is placed. Stereoscopy really is just trying to simulate that. Again, it sounds more complicated than it actually is, and once you do it for a little bit, you’ll get a good feel for how to start shooting them.

Formatting

So you’ve shot your two images – now what? Now you need to format them so they can be seen in 3D. Once again, it sounds more complicated than it actually is as there are several hassle-free options for you to do this.

If you’re taking shots on your phone, you can download the free app 3DSteroid (or i3DSteroid for Apple users) in which you can take shots and format them in a quick and easy-to-use interface. The stereos of the tree up there were both shot on 3DSteroid and what's helpful for beginners is that it guides you to line up your shots with a line at the bottom showing you how straight your movement is.

If you’re a bit more old-school and want to do this on your computer, you can download the free program StereoPhoto Maker which allows you to input your raw pictures and automatically format them for you to save as stereos.

These two apps are incredibly beginner friendly and take out a lot of the guesswork when it comes to formatting stereos. They’ll often place the images so that they can be viewed comfortably, and both have the option for ‘auto-adjustments,’ so if you have a less steady hand for one (or even both!) of the stereos, the apps will do all they can to fix them and make them as viewable as possible.

In 3DSteroid, once you’ve taken your shots, just tap the ‘auto adjust’ button and the app will take care of the rest.

In StereoPhoto Maker, just go to Adjust at the top and click ‘Auto Adjustments.’ A few seconds later, it’ll have done it like magic!

Viewing

Now you have your stereo and it’s formatted all nicely – but how do you actually look at it? Well, a few talented people out there can cross their eyes and ‘free view’ stereos without anything to help them. I’m not one of those people, and even if you can, it can take time to get right. So it’s much less hassle to just go and buy a 3D viewer.

Thankfully, you don’t need to buy a big wedge of Victorian-era wood to see stereos nowadays. The London Stereoscopic Company do a range of what they call OWL viewers (get it? Because it looks like an owl? Kinda. A little bit. Maybe? Sure, why not, it’s good for marketing) which are cheap and efficient to use. There’s the standard OWL, which you can use to look at cards and any stereos you decide to print out or, for the budget-conscious, there’s a Lite OWL which is just the oculars for £5.

If you prefer to look at your stereos on your phone – and are prepared to spend a little bit of money – they offer a special phone OWL which has a metal backing that can stick to your phone, meaning that you can look at them on your phone more easily.

Now, for my personal recommendations on viewers: I always go for the standard OWL. If anything, the back which can hold printed stereos make for a good guide on how straight you can keep an image when you’re looking on it on a computer screen. I’ve never got on too well with Lite OWLS because of that: it’s difficult to keep it and whatever you’re looking at perfectly aligned. 

As with any art-form, the only way to really get to grips with stereoscopy is to actually try it. It’s hard to put into words how exciting it is unless you’ve tried it first-hand. I suppose I’ve failed as a writer by not having the words to convey that. But if you’re happy to make the tiniest investment, you’ll have all the tools to try this yourself!

3DSteroid can be downloaded for free on the Google Play Store: 3DSteroid – Apps on Google Play

i3DSteroid can be downloaded for free on the App Store: ‎i3DSteroid on the App Store (apple.com)

StereoPhoto Maker can be downloaded for free here: StereoPhoto Maker (English) (jpn.org)

OWL viewers can be bought from the London Stereoscopic Company website here: OWL Viewers - LSC Official Online Shop (londonstereo.com)

How I got into stereoscopy

The walls of text above go over how to get into stereoscopy in 2023. The tools I linked to will
give you a solid foundation to build your practice on. When I started in 2013, though, I didn’t
have these. It was just before the smartphone revolution completely dominated how we
engaged with the world, so 3DSteroid was out of the question. As for StereoPhoto Maker, my
only excuse for not using is, as poor as it is, that I was a woefully uninformed kid.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over was my first real experience with stereo: a film that, disappointingly, conforms to the notions held by such critics as Roger Ebert as 3D lacking thematic, narrative or experiential substance. 9-year-old Sam loved it, but when 26-year-old Sam re-watched it for his final MA essay on films that juxtapose 2D and 3D elements, he couldn't help but be let down, considering the other Spy Kids films are brilliant and this one could have really worked. Alas...

So how did I make stereos back in those digital prehistoric times? And what drew me to it? I’ll

answer the second question first, just to be a contrarian. Like many others, I discovered

stereoscopy through the London Stereoscopic Company, though I was a fan of 3D movies as a

kid (especially Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003), a film that, uh, is certainly of its time...) More

particularly, what caught my attention was Diableries: Stereoscopic Adventures in Hell (2013). It

wasn’t for its 3D content, though. It was the aesthetic: Gothic skeletons navigating the classist

rot of Enfer, realised through sculpted characters, modelled and painted backgrounds, and all

printed on delicate tissue paper that appeared monochrome, but when lit from the back,

revealed psychedelic splashes of colour and glowing red eyes in all its characters. I adored how

Enfer was a veiled critique of the Napoleonic Empire at the height of press censorship and

curtailed dissent. These views weren’t just aesthetics for its own sake: they had a purpose; they

said something. Seeing these views, seemingly divorced from our world but reading how much

they allude to real-world anxieties was profoundly moving. And then, once I saw them in 3D, I

was hooked.

Stereoscopy came into my life at just the right time. There’s a story there that will be told more

in-depth when it’s appropriate to do so. For now, let’s say that I left college at an unexpected yet

unsurprising time. I was a free agent, completely unchained from the world. Normally, that’s

liberating: nothing can hold you back. In my case, at that time, it was that nothing was holding

me together. I was tumbling through the days so fast I barely registered when the sun rose and

when the night fell. I needed a structure to, I guess, save me, or at least keep me fixed within a

vaguely Sam-shaped outline. So I latched onto practising stereoscopy: something

straightforward to pick up while demanding that you learn a new skill set. I spoke about this

before, but it also forced me to see and engage with the world in a different, more direct way.

The medium of creating depth requires an understanding of how the world is connected. To do

that, you must be connected to the world, symbolically as well as more literally. So that encouraged me to not completely wither away and actually go outside and interact with the

world I wished to capture.

Now that’s all very well and good, but how did I do that? Especially if I didn’t have – or, more

accurately, wasn’t aware – of the proper tools? Badly, to be blunt. In the Dark Ages, before the

iPhone revolutionarily suggested that phones could also be reasonably good cameras, I used a

cheap digital camera I probably got off the high street in my misspent youth. It was perfectly

fine, especially for then, but nowadays I slightly cringe at how fuzzy the images are and how

there was weirdly a lot of colour bleeding between pixels. A lot of the portraits I shot at that time

are pretty unsalvageable by the quality standards nowadays, which is a shame.

An example of how bad my picture quality used to be. This is the actor Mark Elstob posing as Number Six from the audio re-imagining of the classic TV show The Prisoner. The blurriness of his body and how the colour of the environment bleeds into his clothes is not ideal. I tried my best to rescue this one, including putting it through an upscaler and shooting a whole new background, but I've never been quite successful, largely because of the inherently bad quality.

I took stereos using the method I spoke about in the first part of this post, but I formatted them in

a... peculiar way. I made my own frame in Photoshop – well, ‘made’ in the way that a child

‘makes’ a person with a few straight lines and a massive circle for a head – and manually

placed the shots together. No adjustments, no tweaking, very little art involved. I didn’t even

understand the stereo window at the time and they look awful to actually view. More on the

stereo window another time.

Yeah, it barely qualifies as a frame. There was an attempt at feathered edges that completely

fails and it’s so bland to look at. And what does Dokeru mean? Well, that was my branding at

the time, back when I was going through my weeb phase and thought that speaking broken

Japanese from anime was a personality. ‘Dokeru’ is a portmanteau of ‘Dokuro,’ the Japanese

word for skull, and ‘Dokeshi,’ the Japanese word for clown. Skull Clown. No wonder the frames’

curves looked so awful – the edge at the time was just too sharp!

It gets worse, though. Back when I first started, for some reason, I made each stereo pair

individually. What I mean by that is I had separate Photoshop files for the left image and the

right image. I’d save them as a JPEG and then load them into an entirely separate file to put

together.

Some might say this approach was absolutely nonsensical, and I can’t deny that. I was young:

the young are brimming with both brilliance and boneheadedness. I often veered toward the

latter, and being autistic meant I never had the insight to challenge the wonky logic of this rigid

ridiculousness.

Me sharing the absolutely barmy way I used to make stereos isn’t just for vanity or absolution –

it’s to impart probably the most important lesson I can give: you need a good foundation to make

good things. I fell into stereoscopy and felt my way through with trial and error over the course

of years. If I went about it the right way: learning a bit of the theory, discovering StereoPhoto

Maker and such, I would have had a more intuitive grasp of the basics a lot sooner. When you

know the rules, that’s when you can start making good work – and, more importantly, start

breaking the rules to make even greater work. You can’t jump ahead to breaking the rules

without knowing them because there’s no purpose behind it: it comes from a place of ignorance

rather than expression. I only started making what I would call ‘good work’ in the last three or

four years, when I stopped to really think about stereoscopy on a foundational level and go into

it assuming that I know nothing. And that’s not just good stereo advice – it’s good advice for all

crafts... and advice I’m still trying, vainly, to follow and keep my rampant enthusiasm for new

things in check.

But that said, my early days weren’t entirely wasted. Making my own frame and manually

piecing the stereos together is still something I do in my work – I just have more awareness of

the rules. This very flawed approach instilled in me that stereoscopy is not just about taking

stereos. For me, that’s the absolute start of the process. The real fun begins when I load them

into Photoshop and start tinkering with them, making the adjustments with my own hand. It’s

why I still don’t really use StereoPhoto Maker or 3DSteroid unless absolutely needed: I like to

have a feeling of control when I’m working and that all the things I’m doing are deliberate and

have a purpose behind them. They are both wonderful tools to get you started in stereoscopy,

and I heartily recommend using them as they’ll teach you about parallax, framing and take out a

lot of the time and guesswork out of putting the stereos together. But for me, the real fun begins

when you take the training wheels off and you grapple with the slice of depth you want to

present to the world.