Coachella in 3-d!
PHOTOGRAPHY BY: RYAN COLDITZ
My good friend and amazing designer Ryan Colditz recently returned from Coachella with some three-dimensional photography of the happenings! It’s like bringing a little piece of the mind-melting insanity straight to your face. And, completely fitting for musical photography- think of it as stereoscopic surround sound! 3-D glasses required!
More images & a quirky essay by Ryan himself on the (mostly self-invented!) art of 3-d photography. The dude jig-rigged two cameras with some McGuyver style maneuvers from Home Depot! Great stuff.
The Wow Effect
By Ryan Colditz
I feel like the guy on the couch in Half Baked. I think I could equate everything in life to a great 3D image.
“Hey man….you ever thought what it would be like to climb that tree right there and take a picture…..in 3D? Sooo cool man.”
Why shouldn’t I dream about 3D, I’m hooked on it and don’t need rehab. Doesn’t really matter what it is, if it has good 3D, I’m into it.
The process of 3D photography has been around for over one hundred years and has been waiting patiently for technology to catch up with the concepts and take our visual world to the next level. Growing up I would sit in my parent’s basement and look at stereo cards through an old stereo viewer I was blown away that I could look through a viewer and be transported to a different place and time all together. I would imagine myself walking into the card and experiencing that exact moment of time. Why shouldn’t I, I don’t even have to create the 3D world it is already there for me. I never stopped looking at that that same set of 3D cards because as far as I could tell they were more real than any other image I could look at.
Ten years later I was given a 3D camera found in a dumpster. I didn’t connect the stereocards with this odd, four-lenses camera that looked like it came from the 80’s version of outer space, but I knew it was something to hold on to. After realizing the piece of gold that was just handed to me, I made the connection and started dreaming up what was the best 3D image to me. To this point I had alway seen landscapes and lots of closeups of flowers. Not the most exciting material. I started taking pictures of things I loved the most, art and music. I was sick of looking at 2D shots when I knew there was a better experience waiting to be realized.
There is something about a 3D photo that sucks me in, no matter if it’s a screaming lead singer or a steamy pile of shit. It looks so real that I wait for it to move. It’s too real not to. Not that I want to see shit move, but you get the concept. I think it is the immense amount of nerdiness involved that shuns a lot away from 3D. Yea, I know, I can year you thinking it right now, those fucking red and blue glasses give me a headache. Me too and I wear them for hours on end. My eye doctor told me I was gong to be fine, so relax and let your eyes translate the 3D information before you get too cool to check it out. It might take a minute to get the full effect. Can you afford to invest in a minute?
This 3D world is one not too many practice, but the ones that do are rabidly obsessed. Because it’s that cool. When it comes to making 3D photos I chose to make my own camera rig from pieces fround at Home Depot. Basically what I did was recreate two eyes (one camera for each eye) and each time I press the trigger switch, a blink occurs and that moment is captured in stereo. The slight difference in perspective of the two cameras is what creates the shift and causes the “WOW effect.”
May 1st, 2009 at 4:54 pm
WTG Coldie, we’re proud of you. You need a source of glasses to promote for a cut of course.
GOM
May 3rd, 2009 at 10:51 am
Thanks for adding that missing third dimension. Great stuff!