3D-Con is Virtual and Free
3D-Con, the national convention for the National Stereoscopic Association, is August 12-15, 2021. It’s completely virtual this year again… and it’s free. Learn more and sign up here: 3D-Con.com
3D-Con, the national convention for the National Stereoscopic Association, is August 12-15, 2021. It’s completely virtual this year again… and it’s free. Learn more and sign up here: 3D-Con.com
All our in person meetings have been cancelled due to COVID-19. For information about joining our virtual club meetings on Zoom, write an email to info@psscc.org.
PSSCC Members and Friends,
We have decided that it would be in the best interest of all our club members to cancel our March meeting over concerns about the COVID-19 virus outbreak. I imagine many of our members have been feeling anxious about it. I know I’m getting over a cold (I’m fine!) so I wasn’t planning on attending just out of caution and respect.
Our contest this month was going to be High Angle / Low Angle. If you have images for that contest, then just put them in you back pocket for now. We’ll catch up in April, if it looks like the coast is clear then. Of course, we’ll reassess then whether it’s safe to come out of the house… and linger in groups… in a basement. 🙂
If April’s meeting is cancelled also, we’ll just keep stacking up our contests. April’s contest is macro which is truly one of my favorite favorites! I’ll see if I can find some inspirational videos online and send out some info. If you like photography and you’re STUCK INDOORS… then macro photography is the perfect solution.
April is also our month to select images for the ISCC contest. It would be a shame to miss that, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
For now, stay rested, wash your hands, and be healthy till we meet again.
I hope you and your loved ones had a fun, relaxing, and restful holiday season. Our January meeting is just around the corner. It’s coming up on the THIRD Saturday of the month, January 18. That’s roughly 10 days away.
We have two contests this time again.
Greg Stumph found some stereophotography articles in the New York Times that are worth sharing:
See you all soon.
As we do every summer, PSSCC takes a break in the months of July and August. We’ll start up our regular meeting schedule on September 21, and continue to meet on the third Saturday of every month, except November and December when we meet on the second Saturday.
See you all in September at the address listed on the right column.
PSSCC Members and Friends,
Whoa Nelly!! What a bunch of snow!! As I write this, there are eight inches of winter wonder piled up in my backyard, and it’s still coming down. I hope someone is brave enough to capture some of this in 3D for next week.
Which reminds me, our February meeting is coming up next week. It seems early this month just because the way the weekends fall, but next Saturday will be the third Saturday of the month. I trust the weather will be better then, but keep on the lookout. If the meeting had been scheduled for today, we’d have to cancel. We’ll reassess the weather as the weekend gets closer. Watch this space for cancellation notices. Hopefully the region will be snow-free by next weekend.
Which reminds me that I need to remind everyone that we’re looking for great images of our region for the NSA slideshow advertising our 2020 convention here. As Phyllis announced at our last meeting, the convention will be held at the Hotel Murano in Tacoma August 10-17, 2020. We are planning trips to Rainier, Seattle Center, the fish toss at Pike Place Market, Chihuly Garden and Glass at Seattle Center, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, America’s Car Museum, and the Tacoma Art Museum. Any more ideas? Please share them at the meeting next week.
Which reminds me, next week our regular contest theme will be “Night” which is one of my favorite themes of the year. I’m looking forward to this contest. Night shots offer terrific opportunities for creativity and experimentation. And novelty is spice of life…
Which reminds me: Food! Let’s bring some yummies! Here’s the sign up sheet.
Stay safe and warm this week. We’ll see you all next week.
David
PSSCC Members and Friends,
Happy New Year! I hope the holiday season is treating you well.
Our next meeting is coming up on this Saturday. As you know, this is the first meeting where we meet on the THIRD Saturday of the month. We’ll continue meeting on the third Saturday through June. We’ll take a summer break in July and August and then meet on the the third Saturday in September and October. In November and December we’ll meet on the second Saturday to avoid conflicts with the holidays.
This month our club contest theme is Reflections. This is a theme very well suited to 3D photography so I think we’ll see some of our best stuff this time. I’m really looking forward to it.
Our lunch potluck in December was a great success. Thanks to everyone for bringing so many delicious treats. This month we’re back to our regular volunteer sign up list. You can sign up to bring a thing on this page: http://psscc.org/food-sign-up/
In quick news, I’ve had some success with an outreach effort I made at the the Shoreline Community College. I’ll be working on a one-hour presentation on 3D photography for their Photography Department’s spring quarter classes. I’ll share more details this Saturday, and I’ll be asking for suggestions as well.
Our Facebook page got some interest in the past few weeks. Sadly, I wasn’t watching it closely and didn’t realize that I had to APPROVE new members. Hmmm… I’ll try to watch more closely, but I don’t really spend much time on Facebook anymore. Are there any Facebook fans out there that might want to help moderate the page?
See y’all soon!
In case you couldn’t make it to our September meeting, here’s a quick recap of the important news:
Well, another season begins next weekend! Oh my goodness! I’m sorry for the late announcement, but summer got away from us and we had some genuine work to do to get ready for this year, so we’re a little late getting the word out.
This is going to be a historic season for us, and one of the most interesting seasons for a long time. Gone is our familiar old home in Federal Way, but this year will bring us a whole new range of opportunities.
Let’s start with our contest themes (listed also on our website contest page). These themes were suggested by our members and voted on in our June meeting, last season. There are some challenging themes here, so start planning ahead.
After at least two years of discussion on the issue, we’ve finally made the move to a location closer to Seattle. It’s still not in Seattle, but we hope it’s close enough to attract some additional members.
Meetings will be held at Northlake Unitarian Universalist Church, located at 308 4th Ave S, Kirkland, WA 98033.
Here’s a Google Maps link: https://goo.gl/maps/
Here’s a link to the church floorplan: http://northlakeuu.org/wp-
We’re in Adams Hall (the big one in the center).
Parking is easy in the church lot. Just take the stairs down to the lower level, beneath the main church hall. For anyone with mobility concerns, we suggest you park on State St. to avoid stairs.
For the remainder of 2018 we’ll continue to meet on the SECOND SATURDAY of the month. Then, beginning in January 2019, we’ll meet on the THIRD SATURDAY of the month.
Here’s the proposed schedule at this point:
I’d like to suggest some possible adjustments or additions to this schedule to include some evening meetings later in the season in order to try to do some outreach to other clubs, but we can discuss that more during our meetings.
Speaking of outreach, we’re live with Meetup now. See our profile page here: https://www.meetup.com/Puget-
The Meetup membership costs us $10 a month. That allows us to advertise our club meetings and show some information about the club. The first 6 months are 50% off, so we’ve only paid $30 so far. Our club meeting is then visible to anyone in the region looking for photography related events.
At our June meeting we agreed we’d like to see more educational information as a regular part of our meeting agenda. Some of the ideas suggested were:
We don’t have a schedule yet for our educational programs for the season, but I have always wanted to show the club how Lightroom can be used effectively for 3D photo editing. I’ll put something together for our September meeting. Hopefully in September we can get some additional programs scheduled, at least for the next couple of meetings. If you’d like to volunteer to show us a trick, tip or technique, we’d all like to hear about it.
Workshops/Critiques: Personally, I’d love to see a workshopping discussion as part of every meeting. If you have an image that you’d like to get feedback on, bring it along. We can discuss possible technical and/or aesthetic improvements.
I hope you all got a chance to take some interesting photos over the break, and chalked up a few good stories to tell too. I’m looking forward to the familiar faces, but I expect new ones to be a regular occurrence for us from now on, and our content should keep that in mind. We should be prepared to cover some basics in every meeting.
See you all very soon.
Our March meeting was another outstanding showing with a lot of good images in our contest (Opposites) and a lot of additional work shown besides. A special shout out to Rabih Aboujaoude, our long lost member who wandered to New Mexico and got stuck. 🙂 Rabih won first place in our Opposites contest and landed two second place images besides (in our multi-way tie for second place.)
The slide show of work from David Hagan was also a big hit. If you missed our meeting, you owe it to yourself to see his work on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dddhazan/albums His collection of over 1100 outstanding images is an inspiration. His work is all in anaglyph format, so grab a pair of red/cyan glasses and go explore.
Here’s one more thing worth sharing, an article on creating depth in art and photography with cues other than stereoscopic perception. https://zevendesign.com/creating-depth-art-photography
Next month we have an interesting topic for our contest: Superstitions. Wow, that will be interesting.
See you then.
A very smart friend of mine sent me a passage about the limits of stereoscopic vision from a book he’s reading, Visual Thinking for Design, by Colin Ware (book link).
Some depth cues are not captured in a static image, and are therefore not pictorial. One kind of depth cue comes from the fact that humans, like many other animals, have two front-facing eyes. Visual area 1 contains specialized mechanisms for using the small differences in the images in the two eyes to extract distance information; this ability is called stereoscopic depth perception.
Different depth cues have different uses depending on the tasks we are trying to perform. Stereoscopic vision is optimal for visually guiding our hands as we reach for nearby objects. It works best in making judgments of the relative distances of nearby objects, within a meter or two of our heads. Stereoscopic depth judgments are also most precise for objects that are at nearly the same depth. The brain is not good at using stereo information to judge large relative distances. Because of these properties, people who have little or no stereo depth perception (20 percent of the population) still have no difficulty driving cars or walking around, although they will be clumsy when trying to thread needles.
Stereo technology has, for the most part, been a story of fads that faded, and this is largely because of a failure to understand that the main virtue of stereo vision is the precise guidance of hand movements. The Victorians were fascinated with stereo photos and sold thousands of stereo images. Now they clutter the stands of flea markets. Stereo cameras had a heyday in the 1930s and 1940s but now are almost unobtainable. Many inventors and entrepreneurs have lost their shirts on stereographic movies and television systems. The problem is that none of these technologies allowed for manual interaction with the visual three-dimensional objects that were represented. If we had virtual three-dimensional environments that allowed us to reach in and move things, then we would appreciate stereo technology more. [p. 94, emphasis added]
While I may disagree with some of his particular points (“clutter the stands of flea markets?” Oh, really? Where??!), I think his conclusion is basically correct. We can see stereoscopic depth at a distance, but our brains are really geared to use it best at arm’s length.
That in turn made me remember a delightful (but somewhat jarring) new VR game I saw advertised this week called Beat Saber. Here’s an article about the game, but you can get the idea of the game pretty quickly from this YouTube video.
Here’s a video showing actual game play from the perspective of the player.
This is an outstanding use of 3D in that arm’s length zone, or pretty close. I’d love to try this game, even if I’m terrible at it. It’s like the Dance Dance Revolution of the VR world.
-David
I hope everyone enjoyed a happy Thanksgiving last week. The holidays are upon us, as is the stormy weather. I’ve been spending a lot of time indoors these days, and much of it on my computer working on my image editing skills. I’m learning Adobe Lightroom, and practicing a new technique called Exposure Blending. As soon as I’m good enough at either of them I’ll share some info with the club.
2017-2018 Contest Themes
Heads Up! Next weekend is our monthly meeting.
This month our club contest theme is “Doors, Knobs, and Windows” which is a pretty rich topic with lots of options.
At our last meeting we had a good conversation about moving to a new location closer to Seattle. We’ll spend more time talking about a move at this month’s meeting as well. Don Munsil is heading up the research, and anyone with ideas or suggestions is welcome to share.
This month, I did a little research myself and looked up photography clubs on MeetUp.com. I attended one of the photography club meetings that’s advertised on that site, and I learned a number of things. First, MeetUp.com is a good place to publicise our club in order to attract new members. The club organizers at the event I attended said they regularly get new members through that site. I started creating a profile for our club but stopped when I got to the costs: $10/month. That is a good investment if it brings in a few new members a year, but I thought we might want to wait till we get to our new location to consider it. Anyone who finds us through that site may not be interested if we’re too far from Seattle. On the other hand, if we’re close to where they live, it might be a disappointment if we plan on moving away soon. It can wait till we settle on a place. Secondly, I learned that there are a lot of active photography clubs, and they’re all meeting somewhere. So it’s a rich source of ideas for venues if we find we’re still looking. Those same photo clubs are also a good place for us to do outreach by doing a 3D photo demo as part of their regular club meeting. We could get new members that way too.
As my work schedule starts to get under control, I’ve had a little extra free time lately. Once again I’ve been looking into ways to share our photos online easily. I still haven’t found an easy way to display our photos attractively, with proper attribution, in a format that’s usable by everyone, without a lot of manual intervention. The page I started for our contest winners proved to be just too time consuming for me to keep up with. But I still would like to show off our work somehow. I’m still looking for a solution, but there’s one thing I can do that’s pretty easy. I can create a Club Member Links page that links to our members’ online photo sites. If you use Flickr or 500px or some other sharing site, and you want to add a link to your online photos on our PSSCC site, just send me a link to your page and I’ll add it. In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for a manageable solution for everyone, including those who may not use photo sharing websites.
The weather this weekend promises to be snowy and cold. Take care everyone! We’ll see you next week.
At our October meeting on 10/14/17 we’ll have several items of business.
PSSCC will be selecting entries for the first round of the ISCC competition at our October meeting. We will need 6 entries with no more than 2 entries per person. The format for the images is the same as last year:
Each stereo Image for the PSA-ISCC should be a single image file consisting of the stereo pair with the left image on the left side and the right image on the right side. Image width (horizontal) of each individual image should be exactly 1400 pixels and the height (vertical) should be 1050 pixels, resulting in a combined image file width (horizontal) of 2800 pixels and an image height (vertical) of 1050 pixels. Where the image is not to an exact 4:3 format, image centered black banding is to be used to convert the image to the required 2 x 1400 x 1050 format.
This can be most easily achieved with the StereoPhotomaker “resize” tool in the “Edit” menu option. Select the “Keep Aspect-ratio with border” button and, in the two boxes type 1400 for X and 1050 for Y.
Select the Resample option if it is not already checked and hit OK. Save your image with a new name so that you do not over-write the original.
There is no limit on the size (in megabytes) of the files, so do not use a lot of compression when saving the JPEG image.
Our 2016-2017 meeting schedule begins on Saturday, September 10. Our first photo contest theme will be “Summer Share” as we normally do for our first meeting after the summer break. We’ll discuss contest themes for the rest of the year at our first meeting.
In the last few months of meetings and announcements some websites and tools have been mentioned. Here’s a quick post to provide references for anyone who’s interested.
Before we start, here’s a new one that I’d like to share. This blog/newsletter offers pretty inspiring tips for the aspiring photographer. He’s eager to sell his classes and books, but what he gives away for free is pretty good. Link: http://digital-photography-school.com/tips
Google has a set of photo filters that they just made available for free called Nik. They used to cost about $150, but they just decided to give them away. Be warned, it’s a big download (~500MB). I’ve been using them in Photoshop, but there may be other ways to work with them. Check it out here: https://www.google.com/
Back in February Don showed us some of his VR (virtual reality) viewers. One of the software applications that Don mentioned was Jaunt VR (website: http://www.jauntvr.
That’s all for now.
Before we get to the January wrap-up, remember that our February club meeting is on Feb 13, the day before Valentine’s day.
In our January meeting, we had some technical difficulties (Stuart wasn’t there) so we couldn’t get our voting software working. As a result, for our next club photo competition in February, we’ll have a combined contest theme of Food / Nature.
We also had a frank conversation about the food situation. Marilyn and Joyce have been managing the significant effort for providing, organizing and cleaning up our monthly buffet. There are a few things that they’d like to request.
Food Reminder: Please sign up to bring food. ? Here’s the link to the sign up page.
We also addressed our meeting location. It was suggested that a more convenient location would help existing members come more often, and might even bring in new members. Don said he’d check out a church venue in Kirkland, but any change wouldn’t happen until our next club season (2016-2017) because we’ve committed to the Federal Way Senior Center. I have also sent email inquiries to two Seattle-area churches that rent space to other photo clubs, but have yet to get a response from either.
Don showed us some of his VR (virtual reality) viewers. One of the software applications that Don mentioned was Jaunt VR which allows you to use your phone to view VR. You’ll need a VR headset viewer such as Google Cardboard or similar units. Look online for inexpensive units.
Spring will be in the air next month, and we’ll all start to get that itch to be outdoors more often. But for now, it’s still cold and wet, which is perfect weather to work on your photo submissions for “Food / Nature” for February 13.
See you then.
PSSCC Members and Friends,
Our season opener was eventful. Here’s a brief summary of what happened.
Don Munsil treated us to a quick review of his summer trip to Scotland. He told us about an exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland in Edenborough called Photography: A Victorian Sensation that featured a great deal of stereoscopic photography. In addition, he told us about the Swiss precision drum team at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo called the Top Secret Drum Corps.
Don’s book reviews included a German paperback about the Kaiser Panorama, and 3D Berlin (sorry, no link). His new disk acquisitions include The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet (Amazon disk and filmmaker interview) from the same guy that gave us Delicatessen and Amalie. He also pointed out the wide variety of 3D BluRay disks with David Attenborough available through Amazon.co.uk. Phyllis Maslin introduced us to a special disk called 3D Rarities that was featured at this year’s NSA convention in Salt Lake City.
We started collecting club dues for PSSCC ($30/year). If you missed the September meeting, you can catch up at next month’s meeting.
Joan Story told us that she’s preparing to move into a new house, and decided to sell her husband’s collection of cameras. Her husband Joe, who passed a few years ago, was an avid photographer and collected cameras for many years. Joan and Joe have been long-time members and supporters of PSSCC, and she felt Joe would have liked to see the proceeds of the sale come to PSSCC. Joan graciously presented the club with a check for $4,000 to help support the club and to improve our 3D experience. Thank you Joan (and Joe) for this very generous gift! In future meetings we’ll discuss ways we can use the donation most effectively.
Last year, our humble Puget Sound Stereo Camera Club won first place in the Photographic Society of America’s International Stereo Club Competition. This month, we got a chance to see the certificate in glorious 4D right in front of our own eyes! For those of you who missed it, here’s a 3D representation >>
We saw clips from some of the disks that Don and Phyllis discussed, including a 1940’s 3D promotional featurette about the Pennsylvania Keystone Railroad, a clip from the BBC’s National History Museum Alive about archaeopteryx, and a great selection of 3D images from the Best of Stereoscopy group on Flickr. Next year’s NSA 3D-Con convention is in Tulsa, and we saw a promotional film put out by the event organizers that highlighted the photogenic side of Tulsa, including a surprising amount of Art Deco architecture.
Stuart Turley gave a live demonstration of how to use StereoPhotoMaker to remove the distortion we often see in photos of tall, vertical structures. Stuart agreed to write up the process to include in the “How To” section of our website.
It was a great meeting and a great start to our 2015-2016 season.
See you in October, when our monthly contest theme will be Orange.