A while back on Day 113 my pal Dantes called me up because he had built this rig for shooting stereoscopic images with two SLR cameras. And since we both had the same camera with the same lens we decided to go out that night to shoot some 3D pictures. It was pretty cool to bring back the images and process them for viewing. The trouble with 3D is that the anaglyph method ( the red and blue glasses) is not perfect you usually see some ghost image of the red in the blue or vice versa.
There is no better way to view 3D images, in my opinion, than the view-master. I love the view-master actually and wish there were more contemporary versions of this classic toy. I was pretty inspired by this post I saw some time ago on the MAKE blog, where a person had taken two small keychain LCD monitors (which I think you can get at best buy) and fashioned them into an old view-master. I don’t know why Fisher-Price or whoever owns View-Master now doesn’t make a video version. I think it would be awesome and I’d buy one for myself.
Anyways, last night I decided to make my own custom View-Master reel from the pictures I collected with Dantes. I measured the window size on an original reel and created a photoshop project with guides to help me scale down my images to the right size. (One important thing to note, I created my photoshop project at 8.5X11 in size but I made the pixel resolution quite high, like 600 pixels/in. because when you scale these images down to their tiny size the resolution lowers on them. You want them to be clear and sharp even at full zoom.) Then I went to Kinkos and had them printed on a transparency. I also bought two sheets of their strongest card stock.
I brought the supplies home and I cut out two sides of my own reel out of the card stock. Then I simply cut out the left and right eye images out of the transparency one by one and super-glued them to one side of the reel. Finally, I glued the two sides together and cleaned up the edges as best as I could with an X-acto blade.
It ended up working awesome! Just like an old slide projector presentation I accidentally glued in some of the images upside-down but over all the 3D effect looked nice and clean.
I think this might end up being a future project because it might be fun to create a little children’s story for June using 3D in After Effects. The one drawback is because the images are printed you can see the dot pattern pretty clearly through the view-master and they don’t look as clean as the original photo versions from back in the day.
If I can find a printing process that can print smoothly at that small size then that would be the thing to do, or I could print out the images and then recreate them with pen or paint on transparency. That might be interesting.
Comments
11 responses to “Day 211 / DIY View-Master Reel”
Very cool project. So many possibilities.
Yes!!! This is awesome and so exciting! I can’t wait to try it out
we have our own view master reel! … of me holding my cell phone at the bus station!
Can’t wait to see June’s personalized viewmaster story. Thanks again Charlie!
You reminded me how great the Viewmaster was, I hadn’t thought about them in a long time. My parents had a device similar to a Viewmaster as well for viewing slides but you didn’t put it right up to your eyes – it was handheld though & had a magnified illuminated screen. Wouldn’t having color slides printed of you images be the best way of getting them down to a small scale?
Might be difficult finding a place to develop slides these days & they may not be used to doing it from digital images – but it’s something to investigate.
Sorry for the late reply. I do need to investigate it because through the view-master the images almost have a kind of newsprint quality. Also, I need to find a source for sheets of plastic for the shell material because the card stock solution is not really strong enough for the long haul.
why don’t you make a picture and print it in negative. take another picture with an old analog camera, and get the negatives that go with it and put it in your viewmaster reel?
@Willem – Oh that’s a good idea. Take our digital pictures with our 2 7D’s but then re-capture those images with an analog camera and develop them as slides perhaps. I believe the developed negative (or positive slide) is still quite large for the viewmaster’s windows but perhaps, if when you snapped the original pictures, you backed up far enough away from your subject matter to make them the correct size for the cropped negative, it would work.
[…] Do you remember ViewMasters? This clever company is making customizable reels so you could have a ViewMaster with your own images. I’m thinking it would be perfect for a wedding favor, proposal, big anniversary, retirement bash — or probably a hundred other occasions. The initial set up cost makes making only a few reels pretty expensive for each, but the more you order, the lower the cost per reel becomes. And you can reduce the cost by prepping your own images and putting the art together if you are handy in Photoshop. (Or if you are really handy, here is a way to DIY your own!) […]
AWESOME! One question, though. When you glued the pictures together, how were the pictures positioned? I’m doing this for valentine’s and I that’s where I got stuck.
Thanks!
Cool! For positioning I just kind of eyeballed it. Of course, you want to make sure that the left-eye photo is directly across from it’s companion right-eye photo on the disc that each is oriented the same. But when it came to how I glued each photo down I just tried to keep it as centered as possible. I have to believe that as long as they are close to centered over the window your eyes will be able to do the rest of the work to combine them into a 3D image.
[…] 8 WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE. I have to give it up to Charlie over at The B-Roll for putting together this sweet DYI of how he made a viewfinder that looked way better than mine, in fact, I’m just going to use […]