Sunday, April 11, 2010

3D glasses

looks like a lot of 3d telecasts. found the masters being telecast in 3d today. googled masters 3d comcast and the press release of comcast came up, but nothing about where i should get my glasses.

on youtube i found how to make my own 3d glasses - which is basically painting clear plastic film with blue and red markers and attaching it to any glass frame. for that i need to get out of the house first and get the blue and red markers. The only one we have is a black marker, which may not exactly work on 3d telecasts - or may work very well, depending on how much you like golf!

meanwhile, staring at the 3d image, i found a workaround...there are two images split along the center of the tv screen. so first thing i tried is to focus somewhere in front of the tv such that the tiger on the right and the tiger on the left overlapped. So now i am seeing a very blurred tiger woods, and as i kept staring at him, the brain slowly got tricked into focusing at the tv distance. end result - your eyes are almost crossed as if looking at a point one feet in front of your nose, but they are focusing on something about 12 feet away...

saw the 3d for about 2 minutes - looked good - tiger was way in front of the crowd, and the writings on screen were way in front of tiger...but got a bad headache now....

gonna get my blue and red markers tomorrow and try out next...


Thursday, April 8, 2010

Flashes and Shadows

Another story about never stop asking your qns.... :))

This is not about the shot below, but the shadows in it:



Lipika asked why the shadows are on the right side of the guy on left but on the left side of the guy on right - well, I initially dismissed the qn thinking thats the way it is, i never moved the camera or flash between shots!

Somewhere mid way thru the day, it struck me why...tried out a couple other shots and looks like i got a valid theory :)

This is how the camera lens and flash looks:


Basically, the flash is smaller than the width of the lens. So when doing wider angle shots, the right edge of the lens which focuses on the left end of the frame is way outside the point where the flash is triggered. If we draw that out, you can see that the shadow will always appear towards the inside of the subject on either side of the center of the frame...

Here is what i drew out of the initial shot setting:


as you can see, the camera sees both me and the shadow towards the center side of the frame...same for another subject on the opposite side....