Last month Gillian asked me to help her with an event that she had promised to shoot in 3D. I think I’ve gotten Gillian to adapt some of my “how hard could it be” attitude over the years.
After a ton of Googling, and realizing that that fancy Fuji3d camera wouldn’t be out in time. I decided to tether two Canon SD750′s using the plans described on this fine blog.
After getting all the parts I needed and set up, I chickened out when it came to soldiering wires directly to the internals of the camera. I am a little rusty with my soldiering and I had a 1 week deadline. If I ruined either of the cameras I wouldn’t be able to get another in time for the event.
Luckily, there is a whole community dedicated to exactly what I wanted to do and they had some simple solutions that didn’t require any permanent alterations to the cameras. A little bit of light soldiering and cutting and we were in business. The camera came out great and worked perfect for the event.
For the mount I used aluminum that I cut with a jigsaw and file, then riveted together. For the electronics all I needed was a few usb cables, an audio cable and jack, a momentary push button, and a 4 AA battery pack. All in all, it cost about $75 in parts – including the rivet gun. I already had 1 camera so the second one I got for $100 on ebay.
Merging the photos taken was trivial with StereoPhoto Maker. An awesome piece of free software that I wish was open source so it could be ported to OSX, or better yet a CLI version.
Here is one of the images Gillian took that night. Any pair of red-blue glasses should work with it. You can see the whole gallery here. I have a few more shots from around the city on my Flickr stream.
