Forever and Always Reaching Out to Us
Hi All,

I've been at 3D-Con in Irvine this week, an annual gaterhing of our national 3-D community (National Stereopic Association), plus this year the internationals as well (International Stereoscopic Union). Great fun, lots to see, and the best part is reconnecting with so many great, talented friends. It's not too late for you to come, 3D-Con is still happening today and Sunday. Info at http://www.3d-con.com/.

This is a composite phantogram, one of four I'm currently exhibiting in the Art Gallery at 3D-Con. I'll show you the other three in the next few weeks.

This one combines a shot of Ray Zone from the 2012 NSA convention in Costa Mesa with a bed of river rocks. I hoped to portray Ray in some way as the guru he was to many of us.

On the technical end, I shot the river rocks recently with a Canon EOS 70D on a slidebar, using metal frame sides for phantogram processing. I shot Ray with a pair of Sony R1's synched by a Lanc Shepherd. Floor times on the ground provided framing for phantogram processing, ... but my stereo pairs were mysteriously flawed. For a while I didn't know what I'd done wrong. After phantogram processing, the verticals of the left and right images weren't lining up well at all. Coincidentally I later saw a photo of me shooting that night. In that photo I could see that my cameras weren't pointing down at the same angle. All my shots that night were flawed. I tried various fixes, but couldn't come up with satisfactory results.

Frustrated, I more or less forgot about it. But a couple of weeks ago I remembered this image and decided to give it another try. In doing a composite image, I needed to mask Ray out of the backdrop, and with the backdrop gone, I found I could then easily match the distance from top to bottom of him in the two images, and that solved the problem.

Barry Rothstein

I send out a weekly email of these. If you'd like to be included, please go to the contact page and send me an email.

Previous Images of the Week