[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: 3-d photography • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • mediterranean plants • native plants | 14 Comments »

garden cat and abu ghraib in 3-d!

I’ve writ­ten about our cat Scooter. A while back I’d bought myself a Sput­nik cam­era, and old Russ­ian roll-film cam­era that takes two pic­tures simul­ta­ne­ously, each of them of the same thing, but with sep­a­rate lenses spaced about the same dis­tance as a pair of eyes. With a spe­cial stereo viewer or by mak­ing what’s called an anaglyph you can recon­struct the scene giv­ing you a 3-d effect. When I took the cam­era out­side on the first day I had it Scooter fol­lowed me out.

Above and below are a cou­ple anaglyphs made from images shot dur­ing that ses­sion. If you have a pair of red/cyan 3-d glasses you can see the image in stereo. (A red/greed pair will work as well, though not as well. Clear glasses that use polar­ized light won’t work for teas­ing apart the sep­a­rate images in the anaglyph.) I con­structed the anaglyphs in a way that would still make sense to view­ers with­out the 3-d glasses, in a way that fea­tures the star of each picture…

As much fun as I had out­side with the cat I hadn’t bought the cam­era to take more won­der­ful cat pic­tures. George Bush’s Iraq War was chug­ging along full steam and the noto­ri­ous pic­tures from Abu Ghraib had recently sur­faced. The world was pissed after see­ing them and so was I. Pol­i­tics seeps into my art in var­i­ous ways, most of them sub­tle, but I started a small seri­ous of pieces address­ing the Iraq war. Below is one of those works, a 3-d pho­tomon­tage com­bin­ing staged ele­ments along with one of the most infa­mous war images of recent times. It’s a com­plex response, com­bin­ing what might look like humor with a seething rage I still har­bor towards a war launched by a man who’s now been respon­si­ble for more Amer­i­can deaths than the num­ber of those who died in the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks in New York. And that’s only a frac­tion of those who’ve been killed.

James SOE NYUN: Le Can-Can Abu Ghraib.

Tech­ni­cal Details: The orig­i­nal Abu Ghraib image was gen­tly dis­sected and reassem­bled into two slightly dif­fer­ent images that were then com­pos­ited to give a sub­tle 3-d image. The fore­ground and stage were mock­ups that I staged and pho­tographed twice with con­ven­tional cam­eras, mov­ing the tri­pod to the side about four inches between expo­sures. The “danc­ing” fig­ures were pho­tographed using the stereo Sput­nik cam­era. Two sep­a­rate com­pos­ite images were com­pleted using Pho­to­shop, one reflect­ing what the left eye might see, the other what the right eye would see. The left image was then pasted into the red chan­nels of the final image and the right image pasted into the green and blue chan­nels. The final work is printed fairly large, at a scale approach­ing nar­ra­tive his­tory paintings.

Google “pho­to­shop” and “anaglyph” for a pile of resources on how to make your own anaglyphs.

March 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: 3-d photography • Abu Ghraib • cats • photomontage • Sputnik camera • stereo photography | 2 Comments »