When Shooting Stereo Photos Made Us Go Crazy
Do you ever feel frustrated? Of course you do. We all do. It‘s perfectly natural to feel so every now and then. Whether it is something about your job or something you love to do, like shooting 3D photos for example. It happens. You are human after all. When this happens, just remember the story we are about to tell you in a couple of seconds. Maybe it will help you get through one of those moments when camera just refuses to cooperate. Here we go…
We never use any particularly special equipment for shooting photos. No tripods, no dual lens cameras. Just a regular DSLR or a smart phone. If you like creating 3D photos this way, you might recognize yourself in the situations we are about to share with you. Here is what we deal with almost every day.
3D photography scene setting fiasco
As a photographer you learn to be patient. This is because it usually takes a while to capture that „perfect“ moment. The thing is you can rarely control your surroundings. Shooting outdoors can be pretty demanding. For example: We would like to make wigglegrams capturing the downtown. We choose a fountain as the subject of our photo shooing, it looks amazing in the afternoon when the sun covers it from the right angle. We set the camera to capture the beauty of the object, so of course we need a series of images taken from slightly different angles. However, it‘s not just the angle that differs in each photo. It‘s people, too. Hundreds of people is passing in the background. Oh, man, that helpless feeling! You wish to tell them all to walk less quickly or to have a Hogwarts wand and make the time stop. You choose a faster shutter speed – nothing, you choose a shutter – that doesn’t seem to be working as well. Very soon you realize that the only thing you can do is to just be patient, wait for the background to calm down and wait for the perfect moment to come.
Keeping the camera steady without a tripod
We mentioned a few times that we do not use tripods during 3D photo shooting. The reason is simple. One of the features of our adjusting software is that you can correct most of the errors that happened during the shooting. In our tutorial, How To Shoot 2D Photos For a Perfect Wiggling Image?, we covered why there’s no need to use special equipment when using 3DWiggle. But, we do make mistakes from time to time. As much as we try to keep the camera on the same distance from the ground when taking multiple photos, sometimes the level distance changes as if we were taking the stairs while shooting. These kind of error make it impossible to set 3D photo in any software. Oh, man, we hate when that happens! We try different techniques – putting one hand under another, one hand under the elbow of the shooting hand, standing up, sitting down…but none of these work sometimes. It really make us go crazy.
Setting the model into a right position
We love to make breezegrams with human models. These are the images where a model should make very light movements between the image A and image B, check here. Sounds like an easy job, but we’ve had sooo many difficulties explaining this to a model in case. He/ she either moves too quickly or they don’t move at all. Sometimes we even hire professional models, but the problem with them is even bigger. Professional models are used to change their position completely from one camera “click” sound to another. The transformation they preform from one shot to another is admirable, but it’s opposite of what we are looking for. It takes so much patience and time to get the model-breezegram right. Sometimes we would stay out with professional or less professional models a whole day producing over 500+ photos. But, once we would get back to the office and try to put them into the software, we understand that the rate of usable content is close to zero. Can you imagine the frustration?
Do you experience the same problems when shooting 3D images? What frustrates you the most? Share your stories with us. I am sure we can relate! Remember, you are not alone! 🙂