Alex Fry and Jamie Nimmo will have a 3D photography exhibition “Stereo Portrait Project” in Sydney Australia on 27th May (scroll down for the full press release).
Here is the technical background:
For the Stereo Portrait Project, we used off the shelf hardware and software, from the cameras, lighting, triggering, post production to the printing of the book. We shot using Nikon d90’s with shutter cables connected to an RF trigger. The Lighting system was three Nikon sb900’s, one connected via pc sync in a soft box, the other two optically slaved.
A custom camera rig was needed to put the cameras as close together as possible, roughly emulating the distance between the human eyes. There was no quick or cheap solution to do this, so we built a number of prototypes out of wood and brackets. Since we were taking portraits, having the cameras mounted vertically base to base made the most sense, giving us a relatively small interoccular and a vertical frame. We ended up making three versions of the rig, the first to test how the base plates attach to the cameras, a hand held version that was unwieldy to hold and the final tripod mounted version you see in the pictures.
To synchronize the cameras we used an RF trigger split out to two preload shutter release cables. We tested how fast we could sync both shutters together with the flashes, and got reliable sync up to 1/160 speed. Giving us the ability to have people move around, talk to us and not inhibit their performance. This was very important since hands in front of the body look fantastic in 3d.
The image pairs were then sorted using Aperture before being exported into Nuke, where final tweaks were made before combining them into the final Anagylphic 3D images.
Aperture made sorting and tagging hundreds of very similar left and right images much more manageable, while Nuke allowed us to simply adapt many of the same 3d workflows we use in our day jobs as stereoscopic visual effects compositors.
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