2021 was way better than 2020, lets see if we can’t make 2022 kick 2021’s ass!
Vasquez Rocks in 3D
With all this Star Trek stuff I have been posting about, I wanted to share some 3D images I took at Vasquez Rocks in Southern California. I’m sure everyone has seen the episodes of Star Trek famously shot at the beautiful Vasquez Rocks formation (at least 10). I shot these in winter months of 2007.
Amazing rock formation!
This was from my second trip there. I accidentally found myself in the area without my gear, but vowed to return again to get these images. Hope you enjoy them.
3D Images from Hawaii part 1
Here are a few images in 3D from Paradise. Loved visiting the big island, wish I could have stayed….
Hail King Kamehameha!
Many of these were shot hand held, so there may be a bit of a glitch to them, but I think they turned out all all things considered.
Exciting View Master Reels!
Holy Cow! King Kong on View Master!?!?
Yeah, ashamed to say I never knew this was a thing but my friend showed me her set of King Kong reels for the View-Master. Unfortunately she does not have the package or the booklet, but whatever. The package looked like this when it came out:
He looks like he has a hangover…
The Reels are a bit fades but it is super cool to see Kong in 3D!
quite faded, unfortunately!
Star Trek View-Master Reels!
My sister gave me this years ago but not having a View-Master to view them, they went into a cupboard for nearly a decade. Now I’ve been able to check it out!
SUPER AWSOME!
The images and story all come from the season 2 episode “The Omega Glory”. Not one of my favorite episodes, but anything from the original Star Trek is cool nonetheless.
Images were shot on set with a stereo camera. I wish they shot them all like this!
I read on Memory Alpha, the most comprehensive Star Trek Wiki, that View-Master actually had more sets for Star Trek, including a set from the animated series, and The Motion Picture, among others. Very excited for those other sets, and I need to keep my eyes peeled for them in the future!
Cosmic Telescope
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Captain Kirk got sent into space on the Blue Origin spacecraft. I mentioned that Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos could have done something else with his 5.5 billion dollar 10 minute vacation spending spree to help space exploration. Here is a great example of something he could have done. Funded the construction of a Cosmic Telescope.
I first learned about a cosmic telescope while watching Cosmos: Possible Worlds. Host Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the concept, using our Suns own gravity to bend light to see “…detailed images of mountains, oceans, glaciers, and who know maybe even the cites of these worlds.” Our own sun would become the lens of the cosmic telescope. “Galileo’s best telescope could magnify an image 30 times…”, “…our cosmic telescope could make things appear 10 billion times closer”. Wow! Think of that!
deGrasse Tyson continues: “…what I cannot understand is: why we haven’t built one. We already know how to do it. We have the technology right now. When would you like the future to begin?”.
Amazing show about science!
Hey Jeff, why not skip the 10 minute ride into space and build one of these? I’d gladly buy more products on Amazon if you did. You could even call it the AMAZON Telescope!
Happy Halloween!
This is by far my favorite holiday, and since I am now a father it gives me great pleasure every year when my daughter and I get together to make her costume.
Here are a couple of amazing Halloween store displays I encountered in Rialto California, along Route 66, back in 2006. I did not have my 3D rig with me, I had to shoot hand held, so they are a little imperfect.
Can I help you find anything sir?
Ship of the dead. Died of sugar overdose….
Awesome King Kong Movie Book!
I recently found this awesome King Kong 1976 book about the making of the movie. I’ll probably never find the time to read it, but it is awesome to have. Lots of pictures of the production, unfortunately small images in black and white. Would really love a large book with full color photos, but I’m not holding my breath.
A thrilling story indeed!
I love finding things like this book, but I really love finding a “bonus”, like when you buy a coat at a thrift store for 10 bucks and find a Jackson in the pocket! This one had a movie ticket as a book mark!
$3.50 for a movie? Damn, I hope it was worth it!
One of the images in the book had this rad t-shirt for the crew. I wish I could find a higher resolution of this shirt. It needs to be remade!
Remember View-Master?
While exploring a neighborhood thrift shop with my daughter we found an old View-Master viewer. She thought it was binoculars. Having one as a kid I splurged the buck fifty cost on the item (I did already have some old reals in my possession). Bringing it home and trying it out reminded me that his was really my first exposure to 3D, something I have equated to the original “virtual reality”. Its a simple principle, basically same as an old stereo viewer but looking through transparency lit by a diffused opening in the back.
Daddy, are these binoculars?
This got me thinking, would it be possible to create 3D anaglyph images from View-Master reels? I’ll explore that later, but I just want to mention that View Master is or actually was a local company. They were manufactured here in Portland, and later in Beaverton for decades. I looked back into the dusty cobwebs of my mind to try to remember the View-Master factory. They had a water tower, and if I recall correctly it was by Washington Square Mall. I only found this one picture of the tower on the internet:
Childhood hero heads into space!
I gotta admit that when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went into space my response was: meh, who cares?
It was worse when he returned and “thanked” Amazon employees and customers for making it possible for a super rich man to go on the most expensive 10 minute vacation ever. As an Amazon customer, I was kind of insulted, like maybe if you charged less for products perhaps you could have not gone on $5.5 billion trip. Or even better, maybe spent that to help with scientific research (if he wanted to help space exploration).
But seeing my childhood hero, Captain James T. Kirk go into space, well that’s something else!
Actual image of William Shatner looking out the window of the Blue Origin Spacecraft
Upon returning Shatner stated: "What you have given me is the most profound experience, I am so filled with emotion, just extraordinary, I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now." Shatner is now the oldest person to enter space (except for the abductees of course), at 90 years old. Boldly going, where no 90 year old has gone before!
The WORST Kong knock-off ever!
So if you read my blog at all, you may have seen my posts about all the King Kong knock offs that happened in the late 70s. Some of them good, some bad. But now you get to see my idea of the worst. Queen Kong was produced in the United Kingdom to capitalize on the De Laurentiis King Kong of 1976. It is very clearly a spoof, and it is horrible to watch.
I purchased this film on DVD sometime in the early 2000s, mostly because I knew it was banned from being shown in the UK (due to legal action by De Laurentiis). I do not know if it was shown here in the US. I loved the DVD cover tagline: “She’s in one of her moods again!”.
The movie is a silly, stupid gender reversal film where the main antagonist is a female gorilla on a rampage in love with a male, in London, spoofing not only Kong movies but Jaws too:
Jaws? Where are your teeth lady? Looks more like Gums to me…
Now I know some of you out there really enjoy bad movies, and I count myself to be one of them, but seriously this one just sucks so bad. I’d avoid it. Special effects are far from special, and the script….well lets just say a monkey could write something much better.
Looks convincing to me….
Camping!
Got to go camping again, for the 4th time this year. It’s been rough with the pandemic. First we were told not to go to the State Parks because people flocked there, and due to personal issues last year I did not get out once in the entire summer.
The inside of a tent can be a lonely place…
I camped at Silver Falls State park, and though it is only about an hour and a half drive, traffic was heavy and I did not get there until about an hour before sundown. I decided I wanted to do a small hike to the falls, and a nice ranger told me the darkness there comes quickly, and I should be carful. He was not wrong, the terrain made what would usually be a transition to dusk from dark very sudden. I found myself in darkness I did not anticipate. I got lost trying to find my way back to the trail that led to the campground and had to walk along highway 213 to get back.
It had just rained that day and the air was moist. My flashlight was barely adequate, and I must admit I as having trouble seeing in the dark. My glasses fogged up and I had a Blair Witch moment when my light showed several pairs of eyes looking at me in the darkness. I creeped up, curious who was looking at me, and I saw 3 deer just chilling out under a tree. I wish I had a lens on my camera fast enough to capture the sight!
Marlee Matlin Image on People Magazine
Last image from the batch of files I did for Jeff Vespa of Academy Award winning Marlee Matlin. This was one of 2 images I did for People Magazine. Not sure if the other image ended up in the printed mag or not. Maybe I’ll look next time I’m stuck in line at a grocery store….
Anyways, you can see it here on People’s web site.
Always great to see your work in print….
3D image of the week La Brea Tar pits
Took these images of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
For the image above I used a Lensbaby 3G, which I believe, is no longer in production. It allowed me to to alter the focal plane and lock it in place for both exposures. Though it is not apparent here, this allowed the blur to have dimension as well. You may see that on other shots I have where the subject is closer to the camera.
Lens flare was not present in both images unfortunately. If I could have captured it the effect would have been cool.
This one works very well. Enjoy!
Marlee Matlin Images on Bustle...
Another image from the Marlee Matlin shoot by Jeff Vespa has appeared on Bustle. You can view it here.
Making Anaglyph 3d Images Part 2
Ok, so you have tried to make your own images in 3D, and maybe you need to get some bugs out if. Keeping images on the same focal plane is tough, and using a tripod is only part of the solution. You still need to move the camera the 55mm, and if you pan the head of the tripod, you will not get a correct 3D image, you will get some gobbledygook that will give the viewer a serious headache. So what do you do?
Well I have some solutions. An idea I touched on in my last how to post is to set your camera on a wall, or something sturdy to shoot on. Railings can work well, top of a car, whatever you can find. One solution is to get a custom head. I got one of these:
Manfrotto wormscrew macro photography rig.
it has a wormscrew so you can do fine adjustments for macro photography, but I move it 55mm (using the measuring gauge on the front) for each eye shot. If you want to really get creative, try to put a tilt pan head on top of this! Setup properly, you can get consistently spaced shots every time. They run about 120 bucks on Amazon.
Or you could pick up a special “lens in a cap” for shooting stereoscopic images in one capture. I used to have one of these Loreo image splitters (but it got crushed in my luggage on a flight) and it works well but you are only going to get about 40% of your image between the split and the distortion. This is a great solution for shooting moving objects like people, or nature in windy conditions.
Here are some examples of my shots with it and the 3D images I created:
Image is split, and there is some transitional distortion that will need to be cropped out…
End result. You will always end up with a Portrait orientation with this method…
I recently found this on Amazon, and I’ll post a review once I get mine!
Another thing to keep in mind is that the focus and exposure must be the same for both shots. You don’t want your eyes bugging out on you while your brain tries to decide what focus plane to hone in on when looking at 3D images.
More hints on the way. Hope you are making some 3D images yourself!
Holga on DSLR...
Okay, so I have played around with my $14 Holga lens on my D800, and just like the original Holga, you can never really tell what you have until you have it. The original Holga is locked in at f8, and this one was advertised as just that, but it was not. Looking through the viewfinder was extremely difficult on bright sunny days, so much that I longed for the Holga finder just to compose an image. I have a simulated image of what I see through the viewfinder:
Really hard to compose an image with this view.
This was problem number one. Could not see anything, so composing was frustrating. Then I discovered another issue, in the final shots. A vignette was on every image. Now the Holga is a 120 medium format film camera, and a 60mm lens should not produce a vignette on a smaller image size. 135mm image should have no vignette. After digging around on the internet I found that they added an artificial vignette plate to the lens to simulate the “Holga look”. This became very apparent with lens flare in another image:
yuck!
On the same website I found out that there was also a stop down ring added to bring the f8 to f25 causing the darkness (probably to add sharpness to a crummy lens). These things were making a quirky lens pretty difficult to use, so I decided to remove them.
f25 stop down ring, and vignette dither ring removed from lens.
So now after some basic lens surgery, my lens is now back to the f8 aperture, and focus is more difficult to achieve, but it is the closest thing to an actual Holga. Stay tuned for images from this modification. Hopefully it will be fun to use now….
Mighty Peking Man
Yet another film about a giant gorilla terrorizing a city. And another one capitalizing off the De Laurentiis King Kong of ‘76. This one was produced by the Shaw Brothers, a Hong Kong Studio famous for making the greatest Kung Fu movies of all time! This is one of the more entertaining knock offs that happened in the late 70s. Roger Ebert even gave it 3 out of 4 stars in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times! Pretty good for a cheap monkey movie.
I got the opportunity to watch this at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre some years ago and really enjoyed it, though there were some really ridiculous things going on. The special effects were pretty doggone bad, a lot of matte masking to show the size of the “giant” ape in relation to humans. Still this was pretty entertaining, and fun to watch.
One of the big differences to the other ape movies is that the girl was friends with the ape instead of being terrorized by him. Samantha, an orphaned girl who has grown to a woman of the jungle is friends with all the animals. She plays with all the beasts of the jungle while dressing in a very sheik jungle outfit (which she wears throughout the entire flick).
Dancing with this leopard without him mauling you? This leopard deserves an Oscar for his performance!
Sooner or later the ape ends up in Hong Kong and all hell breaks loose. The ape climbs the tallest building he can find dies in the end. Original ending, huh?
you talking to me?
Tramway Gas Station New Angle
Just found another angle of the Tramway Gas Station in Palm Springs California.
Marlee Matlin Images in Backstage Magazine
Had the pleasure of working with Jeff Vesap this last month on some images of Oscar winner Marlee Matlin. Jeff and I used to collaborate over 15 years ago, back when I was living in Los Angeles. He shot images of Ms Matlin for a few publications to promote her work in the Apple TV+ film, CODA.
I worked on these images for the magazine Backstage. It has been a long time since I have done any celebrity work, so it was exciting to get back into that stuff, and to work with Jeff again!
You can see the images for Backstage here (full disclosure, I did not do the cover).
SCREEN SHOTS OF THE WEBPAGE BELOW:
