Making 3D photos with an ordinary camera has one big disadvantage – you can't photograph the scenes with moving objects. How to solve this problem? You can use a simple 3D camera - we write about here. All the photos in this article were taken with this kind of camera.
If you use a camera for taking left and right snaps for a 3D photo, you have to move it between the right and left snap. In this way you can't photograph walking people and other dynamic scenes, because the moving objects move between the two snaps. For dynamic scenes you have to make the left photo and the right photo in the same time.
You can use an expensive stereocamera for this - but you can use two simple (and cheap) ordinary cameras as well. For the beginning you can buy 2 single use cameras. It's possible to buy the cheapest ones for less than $4 (for one). (In time of preparing of this article even the cheapest digital cameras were quite expensive - now they may offer a better choice.)
Make your 3D camera
When you have 2 single use cameras you can decide how to connect them. You can stick them simply together or use a lath (molding). If you use a lath then you can change the distance between these cameras, which can be useful.
If you decide for the lath, we can reccommend a plastic electrical lath which has 2 parts. These 2 parts shifts one over the second.
Separate the upper and the lower part of the lath, the thicker one short to 25 inches and from the second one use only 2 short parts - as short as are your cameras. To these two parts glue the cameras (as on our photo) and give them to the thickest part of the lath.
The result should be similar to our 3D camera - on the photo here.
Making photos
Now you should measure the distance between the lenses of the two cameras (if you have them on the lath, move them to be as near to each other as possible). The distance is possibly longer than is reccommended (6.5 cm - 2.6 inches), but it's OK. You have only think about it when you take pictures.
As you could read in our magazine sooner, if you have the distance between lenses 6.5 cm then the nearest object on the scene can be in the distance of 2 meters, if the distance of lenses is for example 10 centimeters (4 inches) then the nearest object distance shouldn't be shorter than 3 meters (120 inches), for 13 centimeters it's about 4 meters. If you have the cameras on the lath then you should set the distance to 1/30 of the nearest object (sure, sometimes will be the lath too short).
Taking pictures is quite easy. Select the scene in the viewfinder of one of the cameras and press triggers of the cameras simultaneously. It's good to be careful - both cameras should be in the same height and there shouldn't be any object before their lenses too near - to be viewed only by one of them.
Photos
Finished photos you can scan to your computer and use our software to make 3D pictures as usual.
Some single use cameras have a little bit unfocused pictures, but for our first trials it should be OK. More expensive single use cameras makes good photos. We hope you get very nice dynamical 3D photos.
(3DJournal)
