An Introduction

Anaglyph 3D photography

The images on this blog should be viewed through anaglyph 3D viewers such as these:

The lens for the left eye only allows red light to pass, whereas the cyan lens for the right eye only allows blue and green light to pass.
Two images of a given scene are taken with the camera placed in two positions 6.3cm apart just as the eyes are separated by about this distance on average. Each image captured by the camera has a slightly different viewpoint, just as each eye sees the same scene from different viewpoints.
Every colour image has red, green and blue planes that when combined into a single image form a full colour image.
With anaglyph imaging, computer software removes the red colour plane from the right hand image and removes the blue and green colour planes from the left hand image. Then the two images are combined into a single image in which the colour planes can be seen to be displaced from each other. However, when this image is viewed with the anaglyph viewers, the image is seen in full 3D.

This photograph was taken in the garden of Farthings, the home of my good friend Sir Patrick Moore.

This method of photography lends itself to a variety of subjects, some of which will be explored in this blog.

Pentre Ifan burial chamber in north Pembrokeshire

This set-up of telescopes for solar observing lent itself well to 3D photography

There is a selection of anaglyph rendering software available for download. However, the software I use here is '3D' written by Andrew Sprott. It was written to run under windows but it runs perfectly under Linux with Wine.

The 3D imaging platform

I have experimented to produce the simplest possible device with which to make anaglyph images. An important feature is the small brass chain that loops through the wrist strap of the camera so that if the camera was accidentally knocked off the platform it would be held on the chain and not fall to the ground,

The camera is positioned to take the left hand image 

The camera is positioned to take the right hand image