Background

You know, it occurs to me that you can't see the image I use for my background very well when you use the image in the context of a background. So I figured I'd provide the picture in a post itself for people to look at, without content redirecting your eye (since the image was a background, I converged so the entire image falls into the screen rather than anything popping out, which you'll recall from my focus/convergence post means the blog content forcefully draws your eye away from the background when you're wearing 3D glasses).

Here's the picture. I took it myself from a park not far from where I live.

As I'm presenting it for closer inspection than as my background, though, I'm starting to get self-concious about the quality of the shot. The only non-cell phone / tablet camera (meaning the only camera I can mount on a tripod) that I own is a Fujifilm W3 Real 3D camera. It's a consumer camera, which unfortunately means a fixed interocular distance at roughly the same distance apart as the human eyes. Unfortunately, that distance tends to de-emphasize depth in landscape shots over miles of distance like we see in this picture. Consequently, I did not rely on the camera's built in 3D capabilities.

What I did was bring my camera and my tripod, set it up to snap the left frame, and then move it around a foot to the right to snap the right frame. I used the tripod to allow for a fixed height of the images so try and combat mismatching images. The ground isn't completely level, as you can tell looking at especially the pipe or the lamp post. It's not a huge violation, and shouldn't be off enough to hurt your eyes too much, but it is something that embarasses me.

Another thing I failed to consider when taking the photo was the moving objects in the frame, specifically the clouds and the smoke coming from the smokestack off in the difference (look closely, and you'll see that especially the smokestack is a different shape between the red and cyan frames). While this makes the smoke look really weird, it kind of worked with the clouds. This shot is facing west, and the clouds were moving north that day, or to the right of this picture. Consequently, the clouds aren't as far apart from each other than the more static objects in the picture, and therefore in the final 3D picture have their depth accentuated more than anything else in the picture. This is definitely an unintended stereoscopic mistake, but I consider it an improvement on the picture rather than an embarrassment like the smokestack, pipe, or lamppost. In this picture, the clouds having unrealistic depth makes them feel like they're not clouds at all, but rather a blanket covering the sky. It's not something I've ever literally seen in life, but it gives the heavens a sense of magic. The fact that it was an accidental only emphasizes that, (although the smokestack cutting into them highlights the fact that this was an error).

All in all, I'm not proud of this picture thanks to all the errors that I know should have been fixable. But they're small, and I appreciate the accidental majesty of the picture. Even so, I'm thinking it might be time to find another picture and switch them up. We'll see what I can do. I'm not making any promises.