Brent Lewin’s 3D Imagery
Brent Lewin has a month-long exhibit at the Engine Gallery in Toronto as part of the CONTACT photography festival, featuring his elephant photographic series. Lewin — featured in the April 2009 issue of Applied Arts — also decided to do something a little different for the exhibit.
Complementing the large-scale images of elephants in primarily urban environments covering the walls are four old-school viewmasters hanging from the ceiling. When the viewer lifts the viewmaster to their eyes, they’re greeted with a series of 3D images. I’ll leave it to Brent to explain the rationale and technique behind this innovative mix of new and old technology:
“Last September, I was invited by Engine Gallery to exhibit an abstract portrait series of street elephant skins for the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto. The photos are part of a larger story I have been working on documenting the plight of the Asian elephant and their caregivers in Thailand.”
“I began brainstorming ways to present this work with something new and I became curious about the possibility of exhibiting on old toy viewmasters. After a bit of research I bought an old 35mm film stereo camera on ebay with a view to presenting stereo pairs in 3D on viewmasters. I found a company in California that specializes in creating customized viewmaster reels and they graciously agreed to sponsor my show by providing free reels for my exhibition. Each viewmaster has a unique reel loaded inside, each with a slightly different narrative.”
“My idea behind shooting stereo was to engage the viewer by making the presentation of photos a more interactive experience both in the tactile sense as well as psychologically by creating a small virtual experience of the scene. The Kodak stereo camera has two lenses set apart the same distance as the human eyes (roughly 2.5 inches) so when the two slides are viewed separately by each eye the illusion of 3D is created. Scenes with multiple layers tend to work better and appear as cardboard pop-outs when viewed properly.”
“Since the task of creating viewmaster-style reels is a long process, a more convenient (but less impressive) way to view stereo pairs is to ‘free-view’ the left and right images on a computer screen or in print. With the technique of free-viewing, both the left and right images are always visible so you need to learn to point each eye at the correct image. With some practice most people can learn to achieve the 3D effect.”
“In the examples I have provided below, the image for the left eye is on the left and the image for the right eye is on the right. You stare into the screen so that your eyes are aimed (more or less) parallel. As you stare into the screen you will get double vision as each eye sees the L & R images separately. When you are staring in at the right distance the middle two images will overlap and become 3d. The outer two images will remain and will still be 2D.”
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