Magically Making a 3D Image

 

I’ve attended the annual Consumer Electronics Show pretty regularly since the 1980s. Due to pandemic concerns, I skipped 2022 and 2023.

However this year I decided to go again and just returned from this year’s event.

Naturally my interest in photography sent me over to the Canon booth where one of their presenters prodded me to have my picture taken.

Eric showed me what appeared to be a normal digital camera. He told me that he was going to take my picture and turn it into a 3D image.		After taking my snapshot, Eric walked me over to Jay who asked me to locate my image on the large board beside him and click on my photo.
Seconds later I received an email on my cellphone. It contained the following short mp4 video.

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Eric told me that the photo is passed through software which renders the single image into a 3D mp4 file. I don’t know the exact details of how this happens but the result is pretty cool.

Thanks to the staff at Canon.

 

 

Organizing videos from past years

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My collection of digital photographic files on my hard drive starts in 1998.

Since then I’ve been trying to keep the image files organized by date and event.
 

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Within my PhotoArchive1 folder are more than 63,000 digital images that I’ve taken from 1998 through 2010. This folder is subdivided into folders arranged by year and some folders are further subdivided by month, day and event name.

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Since it’s inception I’ve used Adobe Lightroom to organize and edit most of my photographs. As an ardent user of Lightroom I’ve benefited from the new and powerful features that Adobe continues to add to this software. I’ve spent many, many hours using Lightroom to tag the images and can now easily search for images by date, name, event, category, more.

Two weeks ago as I was going through these older images I realized that I haven’t done a good job organizing the videos that were taken at the same times as the still photos. I’m now reminded that video recording was missing from the digital cameras that I used. It wasn’t until about 2004 that my first digital camera had video capability. These videos were small sized producing 320 x 216 resolution movies. By about 2006, the resolution of my movies jumped to about 640 x 480. Since then resolution has grown by leaps and bounds with many non-professional cameras offering 1920 x 1080 and some even having 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160.

Let’s get back to my past videos. I use Lightroom to easily spot the videos. then I make digital copies of all of these videos with a set of filenames that clearly identifies the date of the recording.

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With Lightroom I’m looking at the contents of the 040523_Birthday folder where I see two videos files – one 9 seconds and another 15 seconds in length. From here I Export a copy of these videos and separately rename them with a prefix of 2004_04_ to make it easy to determine the date taken.

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I repeated the process of Exporting the videos from Lightroom from each folder. This took many hours over a several day period. When I finished, I had processed more than 1150 videos.


Above you can see a group of the renamed exported videos. All of these videos (more than 1000) are now in a single folder that other members of the household can view at their leisure.

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The year and month prefix (in this example 2010_09_) help to put the videos into a chronological context but is not helpful otherwise. However the small thumbnail photo provides a better way to key in on the contents of the video. It’s not perfect, but is certainly a better way than keeping the videos hidden within my PhotoArchive1 folder.

Would you be surprised to learn that I have never viewed many of these videos? Up to now I have concentrated on the still images in my large collection and have largely ignored the videos. With my videos now more organized I am anxious to view these “motion pictures” – some going back almost 20 years.

One of my future missions is to uncover the videos that I took from 2011 to the present.
 
 
Written by: Arnie Lee
 
 

Large Size Prints Without a Large Price

Some call me “old school” but I’m not a big fan of showing pictures on the tiny screen of my cellphone.

Quite often I print some of my favorite shots onto photo paper. With my Epson ET-3750 Printer I’ve made hundreds of 4″x6″ prints and dozens of larger 8-1/2″x11″ enlargements. In the two years that I’ve had the ET-3750 printer I have never had to change an ink cartridge. The printer’s large EcoTanks are refillable making the cost of the prints very affordable.

Every so often I’ll take a picture that I’d like to show off – meaning print a bigger enlargement. Earlier this year I found out about the Epson ET-8550 EcoTank that handles paper up to 13″x19″ at an affordable $600 price.

Here’s a few short steps for setting up the printer for use.

 

The shipping carton is about 30″ x 20″ x 10″ and weighs about 20 lbs.	The bright blue tape secures the parts during shipment is easily removed.
The printer uses four inks: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The shipment includes a second bottle of black ink.	Each ink bottle fills the respective reservoir. The bottles are “coded” to prevent inadvertent filling mistakes.
You can visually view the level of each ink reservoir. The ink supply will yield about 2400 4″x6″ prints for about 4 cents each.	The bottom tray holds smaller paper (e.g. 4″x6″) and larger (8-1/2″x11″). The rear paper feeder holds larger paper up to 13″x19″.
Here is a completed 13″x19″ print. You can see the rear paper feeder.	You can compare the print size next to the 12″ ruler. This print was on standard ink print paper.

As you can see I’ve been able to make a bunch of big enlargements – at a reasonable price.

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The ET-8550 has other features other than its large print capability.

Wireless connection to your Mac or Windows PC
Two-sided printing
High resolution document scanning and copying up to 8-1/2″ x 14″
Handles variety of papers including glossy, matte, texture, cardstock

For those of you who like to print big – this is an affordable and capable printer.

 
 

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