How to Take Stereo Photographs
We are often asked this question. The answer is simply, ‘Yes, very easily’.
As with many things, the more practice we put in, the better stereos we will produce, but the technique of taking sequential stereo photographs can be learned in a minute.
It does not matter what kind of ‘mono’ camera we hold in our hands. The method is to stand with the camera pointed at the subject of choice, and put the weight of our body on one leg. Then click the shutter. Now, keeping the camera pointed at the subject, transfer the weight of the body on to the other leg, and click again.
That is all there is to it. The result of this maneouvre is two views of your subject, taken from roughly the distance apart of the eyes, and once these pictures are mounted in such a way that they can be viewed as a stereo pair, they will give a perfectly good three-dimensional rendering of the subject. Of course, this method usually only works well if the subject keeps still ! Just like T. R. Williams in his ’Scenes In Our Village’, we may be able to ask our subjects to ‘freeze’ for the duration of our two exposures. And sometimes if they, or the other elements of the picture do not obey, the results will be … interesting! The technique can be extended in many creative ways. If, instead of simply transferring our weight between shots, we deliberately make the ‘baseline’ longer, we will achieve an exaggerated stereo effect … a hyper stereo. Again, this is exactly what TRW chose to do, in the SIOV series. Sitting in a plane, looking sideways out of the window, we can simply click to capture a cloud formation, or a city below, and then click again as soon as the camera permits. The motion of the plane provides us with a long baseline for our sequential stereo pair, and the results can be stunning.
Of course there are stereo cameras out there, and these will take both pictures simultaneously, whether the subject is in motion or not. A Stereo Realist can be bought in an antique camera shop, or on the Net, probably for less than a hundred pounds, and the viewers that go with it can also be found. The Stereo Realist is a great piece of equipment – one of us (Brian) carried one around constantly while touring the world for many years, and the results can be very satisfying. It takes 35mm film, and all the apparatus for mounting the slides in stereo can still be found. Check elsewhere on this site [Links Page] for links to suppliers of 50s stereo equipment, or look in the pages of Stereo World.
Home-made prints can be mounted in pairs, just like the 1850s cards, but in the digital age, it is also easy to assemble a stereo pair in Adobe Photoshop, and it can be viewed on the computer screen itself, with our viewer – or printed out and viewed on paper.
Experiment ! Be brave ! Good luck !
Cheers
Brian
