Archives: anaglyph

Here’s a peek at some photo and body art work I’ve been experimenting with. As with all things, I’m not sure where I’m going with it, but I’m sure it’ll get somewhere at some point.

The bodypainting was a lot more difficult than anticipated. Go figure – but living skin is not a very good surface for this. I could not get fine detail, especially once we had applied a full covering of cream based white. It was like painting on top of a layer of wet paint.

The original plan was abandoned and I had to improvise. We’ll try again with some kind of stencil scheme, I think.

Animating paint with muscle driven skin could be a point to connect to the performance work I did decades ago.

Maybe there’s a way to take this in a tableaux vivant/performance art/dance direction, and produce pieces that can be shown in the context of a performance but the components can still be sold in pieces?

Bonus experiment: I’m still trying to make these anaglyphs work. Eventually I’ll have to give up and build a rig for mounting two cameras and slave them to each other so I can fire both shutters at once. There are limits to what can be done asking someone to stand really still and moving the camera slightly between shots. (You need those red/blue glasses for this to work.)

So I’ve been working on some anaglyphs. Those are those red/blue 3D images. All you need to view them are any pair of cheap cardboard red/blue glasses.

I don’t have a real stereoscopic camera, though, so instead I asked my model to stand really still, and I took two consecutive photos at a slight displacement, hoping this would be good enough.

In a few cases it was! For example, here are two that worked (use your red/blue 3D glasses if you have them!):

and…

I was working on the pair of photos for the pose at the very top of this thread. In those, the model is actually wearing a very stylized rabbit mask. When I anaglyphed them the body worked incredibly well, it’s actually the best, most rounded 3D I’ve managed so far! But the head was tilted wrong in one of the two photos, so the whole illusion fell apart at the neck.

I wanted to try to save it. I began the process of puppet warping (a thing in Photoshop) the head in one of the pair of photos, and in that process I needed to do a content aware fill of the space under the selected head, to provide a fit background to warp it over.

Look at what happened.

I mean, just look at it!

Now try to sleep.

I dare you.