MGM Studios in stereo

[Dan]

Here I have a pair of stereo composite pictures. You view them by crossing your eyes so that your left eye is looking at the right image, and vice versa. One trick to accomplish that is to hold a finger in front of the monitor and focus on it, then move it towards or away from your face until the two images on screen line up and form a third image in the middle. Then shift your attention to that third image and focus on it. I've done this frequently enough that I don't need to use any gimmicks, I just look at the picture and make the two images line up.
I tend to exagurate the seperation of my stereo images, it may make it harder for some of you to focus on it. But I do it so that larger distant objects look like smaller closer things. Depth perception from stereo vision is fairly limited, it only works over a short range. With normal eye seperation you might not see much effect at all at the distances these shots deal with.

I try to do this as often as I can in Disney World, but it's difficult because I have to take two shots sequentially, and everything in the scene has to remain perfectly still. Which means that unless the air is perfectly still I can't have any vegetation in the scene, and there can't be any people in the scene because I can hardly ask an entire crowd of people to stay still. So mostly I end up doing these shots of large structures. I think the trees in the ATAT (Star Wars walker) shot came out decently though.

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[Kelly Grannell]

I love the AT-AT. Now all you need to do is add laser shots, sound effect, make it moves... ur... uhm... nevermind

 

[Scott]

VERY cool, Dan. Do you have some kind of camera-shifting device or do you just manually move the camera between exposures?

 

[Dan]

I manually move the camera sideways. My specific technique is normally to just leave the camera up against my face and lean my whole body to move laterally, or if I need more shift I sidestep. That way I can attempt to keep the camera level and pointed in the right direction since I'm watching the scene through the whole process. Also of note is that I either have to use exposure lock (the asterisk button on Canon cameras) or else just set the exposure manually if I'm doing a big series (I often take a bunch of pictures as I'm moving sideways, because I never really know how much seperation I want, it also gives me a lot of shots to choose from because some are often poorly aligned), otherwise I risk getting different brightness levels on different shots and then that has to be equalized in post process.
I'm rather sloppy, but since I typically shoot distant objects minor differences in camera height are less noticable. On the other hand normal stereo seperation shots would require less motion and so I could probably do them more accurately.. but I don't find many close up scenes that are still enough for me to take two shots and have everything stay exactly the same.