She seems to like what she sees:
I converted this image from a stock photo by Lev Dolgachov (the same photographer who shot the beautiful woman in the white skirt). I may have a use for her later, in house ads or link graphics, or some similar application.
Bruce Feist is a high school math teacher in Virginia. Using at least 38 cameras (I'm counting the one that took the picture), he shot this whimsical photograph of a photographer made of cameras. It looks like a robot, or possibly a monster, but a friendly one. Feist calls it a self-portrait.
Today was Labor Day in America, a day for relaxation, and perhaps a last chance to enjoy the outdoor leisure activities of summer. It seemed a perfect time for posting this very interesting 3-D photograph by Ian Straffin of the "Super Spiral," a spinning carnival ride. Ian left the shutter open for three seconds to achieve the motion blur. And yet the ride operator and the seated woman are in razor-sharp focus; neither one of them moved at all, not even to breathe, or scratch their noses! Relaxation indeed.
Ian's photostream on Flickr is full of very good 3-D pictures, too many even to count. Browse through them, when you have the time.
This afternoon I took a few photos of the campus of Oklahoma City Community College, the school where I teach. Classes are not in session yet, so the place was almost deserted.
I only had one camera, so I had to shoot the left and right views separately, which is a dangerous business, because absolutely nothing must move between the exposures. Fortunately, it was a calm, sultry day in Oklahoma City, with no wind to blow the trees around.
This is indoors; I was on the third floor, shooting down. I didn't realize until I got home that somebody was sitting in that chair. He moved his chair between my shots. D-oh!
Boris Starosta creates 3D stereo images, as fine art and as commercial work. A three-time winner of the Stereo Image of the Year award from the Photographic Society of America, he truly is a master of 3-D photography.
Starosta has four online galleries. One for portraits, and one for nudes, one for his commercial work, and one for his Technobot show of CGI anaglyphs. Each gallery has a collection of thumbnail images. Each thumbnail image leads to its own page, and each page has several stereo versions of each photo. To see the anaglyph versions, click on the little 3-D glasses icon: 
All visitors will enjoy the pictures, and artists will appreciate how he doesn't merely exhibit his work, but also shares some of his expertise and his thoughts about the medium, and on how stereo portraiture differs from flat portrait photography. My only criticism is that the site seems not to have been updated in a few years. I worried that Starosta had met with some tragedy, but happily, no. I found him alive and well and selling prints on Ebay.
Slawek Wielhorski is a young photographer in Warsaw, who also goes by the pseudonym "yellowish haze." His huge anaglyph gallery on deviantart.com shows an impressive variety of subjects. My favorites were his urban views of Florence and Rome, but whatever your own preferred subject is, he has probably done it. Forests and fields, rustic farm houses, statues, beaches, clouds, snowdrifts, jack-o-lanterns, rock formations, snails,... even a charming series of dolls in a dollhouse. There are 462 photos in all. His high level of technical skill and his intuition for choosing the perfect view make each one worth seeing. Even if you only spend a minute looking at each picture, you will enjoy over seven hours of top-notch 3-D viewing. Some of the images are offered for sale as prints on the site, if you want them on your wall.
(And when you're done with that, Wielhorski's blog also makes for interesting reading. It's in English.)
What would happen if someone made 40 million pairs of 3D glasses, and then distributed them, for free, all over the United States? We'll start finding out today. Say what you will about Hannah Montana, but when someone writes the history of 3-D art and entertainment in 21st Century America, the date July 26, 2008, will have to be noted as the start of a new era.
Bradley Meehan is an entertainer in Kansas City. Yesterday, the day after the Hannah Montana concert was televised, he published his very first set of 3-D photographs, a series of nine compositions of household objects. He learned how to do it, and he did it, and he published it. They're not bad.
I believe he is part of a larger story. This week in America, we are seeing what I will call the "Hannah Montana Doorknob Effect." Millions of Americans -- I mean, tens of millions of Americans -- who did not own 3-D glasses last week, suddenly have them this week. And they want to use them. They want to see more 3D pictures, videos, and games. Some of them even want to create them. They have opened a door into a new medium, and Hannah Montana was their doorknob.
Cars in 3D is a gallery that knows what it's about. What it's about is cars, in 3-D. Photographer Benny Allan Andersen has captured portraits of every sort of car in its natural environment: the street. Some are sports cars, some are sedans. Some are shiny and luxurious, some are dull and ordinary. Some are being driven; most are parked on the street, silently waiting for their owners to have need of them. But each has its own personality, now recorded for posterity in anaglyphs by Andersen.
There are 152 photos, spread out over eight pages (the links to the other pages are at the top and bottom of each page). Most of them appear to be located in Copenhagen, though some could be elsewhere.
WHAT IS A PHANTOGRAM, AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
A "phantogram" is a special kind of 3-D illusion, a kind that has even more of that stuff-popping-out quality that can make a photo or drawing seem solid and real. If you enjoy experiencing the illusion of depth -- and you must, or else I cannot imagine why you are reading this -- and you have not seen phantograms before (or not seen them properly), get ready for a surprise. This is 3-D like you would not have thought possible.
HOW TO VIEW A PHANTOGRAM
Phantograms have to be viewed at an angle. If you are looking straight ahead at your monitor, as in the illustration at right, your monitor should be tilted back 45 degrees from vertical. If you are looking down at your monitor, as you would with a laptop or small screen, the monitor should be tilted back even further, perhaps even laid flat. If your monitor doesn't swivel, you'll have to prop up the front of it somehow, with books or other objects. And if you really can't tilt your monitor in any way, you'll just have to move your head low enough to look up at it, perhaps by sitting on the floor.
Why would you go to all that trouble just to look at a picture? Just do it, and then look at this picture. That's why.
You see? That is so real, it's almost frightening. When photographer Dan Jacob created this crocodile image, he says children "were daring each other to place their hands in the gator's mouth." Yes, it's the same Dan Jacob who made the 3-D lilies video I posted yesterday, and he happens to be a champion phantogram maker. He has a set of them on Flickr, and it is probably the best collection of phantograms in the world today. That might sound like hyperbole, but you also have to remember that very few artists are making phantograms today; it is something of a dying art. A Google image search will turn up other examples, but Dan's are the best. I'm glad he made so many of them.
THE FUTURE OF PHANTOGRAMS
Will phantograms ever become popular? Or if not popular, then maybe not quite so obscure? They might, as flat-panel monitors become the norm. Could you imagine the whole family wearing their 3D goggles, gathered around their tilted television, to enjoy a phantogram movie? I can imagine them. They look silly. But they're enjoying themselves, and that's what counts, isn't it?
The towering monster pictured above is a louse. Some of the most fascinating (and creepy) 3-D images are insects and spiders, shot with microscopic lenses to show astonishing detail. I have not found one single website with a comprehensive gallery of such images, but I have found three online resources that are worth seeing.
The 3D Bugs gallery at 3dimages.co.uk has two pages, with 16 3-D photos of beetles, fleas, lice, flies, weevils, mosquitos, and other crawlies.
The 3D Insects gallery (12 images) and the 3D Spiders gallery (12 images) are part of the portfolio of photographer Wim van Egmond.
Finally, also by Wim van Egmond is The Fly in 3D!, a special pictorial feature on the Microscopy-UK website.
Here at the Swell 3D labs, we rigorously test every product we recommend, evaluating for every conceivable use. For three days now, we've been testing those free Hannah Montana 3-D glasses that we got on Sunday from Wal-Mart.
As the photograph above shows, the Hannah Montana 3-D glasses passed the "cow skull and Hannah Montana wig" test. This is encouraging news indeed, from an anaglyphic standpoint. (NB: viewing this photo requires wearing Hannah Montana 3-D glasses.) We may keep you apprised of further tests in the coming days.
If you don't have your free Hannah Montana 3-D glasses yet, they are available at Wal-Mart, for free.
Somerset in 3D delivers exactly what its title promises, and more. Photographer Alan Woollard has spent years shooting superb 3D anaglyph pictures of the towns and villages of this county in the southwest of England. The sheer quantity of the collection is impressive. Gallery One is a list of all the Somerset towns and villages Woollard has visited, and each location links to its own page of 3D photos. A visitor could spend hours touring this gallery, clicking on one old Saxon place name after another -- beautiful names like Batcombe, Ditcheat, Moorlinch, Porlock Weir, and even Woollard -- and still not see all of the pictures.
I don't know much of anything about Somerset. (All I know is King Alfred burned the cakes there.) But after spending a morning on this site, I feel almost as familiar with it as with my own home town. That is a tribute to the photographer's skill; one gets the impression that he has a bond with the land, and with its history, that makes him an ideal guide.
In Gallery Two, Woollard ventures beyond his county line, to guide you through the rest of England, and to locales in five other European countries. He shoots Europe with the same skill, if not the same thoroughness, as Somerset. The visitor will return feeling refreshed.
This photographer, who calls himself "khnemo," creates wondrous anaglyph nature photos. Quite simply some of the best work I've ever seen. I commend his entire Flickr gallery to your attention, as well as his WordPress blog. The text is all in German, but the pictures speak for themselves.
Joel Fletcher, a stop-motion animator and a superb photographer, has several galleries of 3D anaglyph photos on his website, joelfletcher.com. Many of them (such as the sexy robot above) are from his work in the movie industry. But there are also many nature photos (including Bryce Canyon, the most photogenic hole in the world), and glamour shots (yeah, the girls are beautiful). Go see this site!
