bloom day–in 3d!

Get out your 3D glasses! Part of this Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day post­ing comes to you in glo­ri­ous 3D, inspired by the news that 3D tele­vi­sion was the big news at the recent Las Vegas Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show, and by past, cur­rent and future 3D movies (Avatar, The Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon, Alice in Wonderland).

This is one of my clones of Arc­to­tis acaulis, which is just com­ing into bloom.

To view the 3D effect you’ll need a pair of glasses or a viewer that has a red lens over the left eye and a cyan (green works too) lens over the right. This image, what’s called an anaglyph, is pretty low-tech, more Black Lagoon than Avatar, but it works. I won’t detail all the steps for mak­ing it, but there are lots of expla­na­tions out on the web for how to do it in Pho­to­shop. [ Here’s one. ] You can also use a good photo edi­tor like Pho­to­shop Ele­ments that will let you adjust the indi­vid­ual color chan­nels of the image.

You don’t need a proper 3D cam­era to pho­to­graph slow-moving sub­jects like flow­ers, but you’ll need two sep­a­rate images, one for the left eye, and another for the right. Just take two images of the same sub­ject, mov­ing slightly left-to-right before you click the sec­ond image. If you have a cam­era with man­ual con­trols, you’ll get the best results if you focus and set the expo­sure manually.

This is the image pair I started with for the anaglyph above. You might even be able to view this raw pair in 3D. Some peo­ple are able to prac­tice what’s called “free-viewing,” where the left eye focuses on the left image and the right eye on the right-hand one. You’ll even­tu­ally see three images, and the cen­tral one will sud­denly pop into 3D.

This last pair shows the next-to-last step big step, before you layer the cyan image over the red one to cre­ate the final 3D image.

The rest of this post returns to stodgy old 2D. Sorry.

Win­ter is the big bloom sea­son for many of the native plants, as well as for many plants adapted to South­ern California’s mediter­ranean cli­mate. Here are many of the plants flow­er­ing right now.

Here’s the agave I fea­tured promi­nently in last month’s post­ing. It’s near­ing its half-way point on the spike.

First blooms of the sea­son on Ver­bena lilacina.

First blooms of the sea­son on Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astra­galus nut­tal­lii.

The very first, brave bloom on another Arc­to­tis acaulis clone, ‘Big Magenta.’

First flow­er­ing on another plant, likely Cras­sula mul­ti­cava. The bed where this plant is will soon be cov­ered with a dense mist of flow­ers for sev­eral months.

Another flow­er­ing cras­sula, Cras­sula ovata, your basic jade plant.

Black sage, Salvia mel­lif­era, com­ing into bloom.

Santa Cruz Island buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum arborescens, still blooming–the Ener­gizer Bunny of buckwheats.

…some weird bromeliad. I have a likely name some­where, but not stored in my brain’s RAM right now…

I was tak­ing some pic­tures of this desert mal­low, Sphaer­al­cea ambigua, but was more cap­ti­vated by the inter­est­ing dam­age pat­terns cre­ated by a leaf-mining insect.

And last but not least: What I’m cer­tain will be the last paper­white nar­cis­sus of the sea­son. I keep think­ing that, but another clump pushes up through the earth and starts to flower. I’m not complaining.

As usual, my thanks Carol of May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day! Check out what’s in bloom in other gar­dens around the world [ here ].

If you haven’t had enough of the 3D pho­tos, check out a much ear­lier 3D gar­den blog post [ here ].

Now enough of this 2D indoors non­sense. Open the door, and go out­side and enjoy your gar­den in the grand glo­ri­ous 3D it comes in naturally.

January 15 2010 12:03 pm | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: • • • •

14 Responses to “bloom day–in 3d!”

  1. Brad B on 15 Jan 2010 at 12:50 pm #

    My 3-D glasses didn’t work for those pics. I want my money back. Just kid­ding. There are two forms of 3-D glasses now some­one told me. I like hav­ing updates on the agave of course. Too bad you can’t have a series of elapsed pho­tos of the blos­soms spread­ing up the spike. The pics of the dam­age on the desert mal­low are also great.

  2. Elephant's Eye on 15 Jan 2010 at 12:59 pm #

    Skip the weird glasses. Get really close to that image, so your nose is almost touch­ing the screen. Then back off slowly, and your brain will show a won­der­ful 3D image. Actu­ally I saw 3 per­fect 3D flow­ers. There was a fash­ion for this some years ago in Switzer­land. If you have an image to play with, you just have to teach your old brain a new trick.

  3. Loree on 15 Jan 2010 at 1:16 pm #

    I was hop­ing you would show off that agave bloom again, thank you for not dis­ap­point­ing me! That Bromeliad is to die for!

  4. Joco on 15 Jan 2010 at 2:33 pm #

    James, the dif­fer­ence in our cli­mates is really telling at the moment. To have paper-whites on the one hand, and the likes of vetch, salvia and ver­bena on the other, all at one and the same time, seems almost as unreal as your 3-D.
    And yes, I too was cap­ti­vated by the leaf-miner’s artis­tic efforts. As long as they are on your leaves and not mine :-)

  5. Helen at Toronto Gardens on 15 Jan 2010 at 2:34 pm #

    Cool. I was able to give it a cross-eyed stare (not to be con­fused with “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear”) to get it into 3D. Con­grat­u­la­tions on a very impres­sive bounty for a Jan­u­ary blooms day. Love the idea of “a mist of bloom” and will prob­a­bly steal that one day.

  6. Susie on 15 Jan 2010 at 11:59 pm #

    Wow, lots of beau­ti­ful things bloom­ing down there. That bromeliad is stupendous!

  7. Country Mouse on 16 Jan 2010 at 4:39 pm #

    I’ll have to try again on the 3d with the com­men­ta­tors’ tips! I can usu­ally do those magic eye books. I think one rea­son i’m into natives is that it cuts down on the bewil­der­ing mul­ti­plic­ity of gar­den plants avail­able — nice to see your choices. I’d like to have more white plants — I dream of hav­ing a moon­light garden.

  8. tina on 17 Jan 2010 at 5:44 am #

    Too cool and most impres­sive. I wish I had a pair of 3D glasses nearby (I prob­a­bly do some­where but can never find them when I need them). That is neat!

  9. Liisa on 17 Jan 2010 at 5:54 am #

    How cre­ative you are, with your 3D image. A flower fit for the movie “Avatar”. :) Your Agave is amaz­ing, one of those plants I can’t do with­out, and gladly enjoy in pots. You have a delight­ful vari­ety of blooms, most enjoy­able for those of us in the north. Thank you for sharing.

  10. Carol on 17 Jan 2010 at 7:58 am #

    I knew I should have kept my 3D glasses from Avatar! Very cre­ative effort here! I can­not make out what is hap­pen­ing in your agave photo above but it is quite inter­est­ing! Nice blooms … snow and ice here in New England. ;-(

  11. Noelle/azplantlady on 17 Jan 2010 at 12:16 pm #

    Super cre­ative way to view plants. I have to try it out. I love your agave. I am a SoCal native, but moved away after col­lege, 23 years ago. How­ever, I still enjoy grow­ing many of my favorite plants that I grew in CA.

  12. Gary on 18 Jan 2010 at 9:06 am #

    So, I click on this web­site and all of a sud­den see 3D plants!
    Wow! Would it not be neat to be able to really pur­chase and plant 3D plants in our gar­dens! Talk about the col­ors…
    Great fun site! Enjoyed view­ing it.
    GR

  13. George on 21 Jan 2010 at 8:08 pm #

    Hey Jim,

    You can use this place to make your pics 3D and no glasses needed!

    http://www.start3d.com/

    It looks like you only need to take 2 pic­tures three inches apart, send it to their ser­vice, and they do the rest.

  14. lostlandscape on 22 Jan 2010 at 10:31 pm #

    George, that’s pretty cool, espe­cially the piku-piku 3d pro­cess­ing. As you get closer to macro work, the rec­om­men­da­tion of 3 inches apart would prob­a­bly work bet­ter at a much smaller dis­tance to give you a bug’s eye view.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply