Slightly Drab, but not Flat!

We're safely back in Arizona again, but our last day in Illinois, I took a walk down along the Fox River adjacent and into Tekakwitha Forest Preserve, where I stop almost daily in Spring and Summer.  With the arrival of Winter in a few days, there was little to grab my attention, yet with the absence of vegetation, it opened up some other views.  More about that in a minute...

The streak of snowless days continues at 286 as of today, but last week there was a smattering of, well something...  In the shadow of some of the tree roots collected little piles of what looked like snow pellets.  But since there wasn't a measurable accumulation (.1"), it didn't count...  But at least it was a little hint of what will eventually swallow up the landscape soon...

Down on the river, it was a little blustery once out of the shelter of Tekakwitha Woods.  And quite the cooling effect producing a significant drop in the wind chill.  It made for some ripples in the water, darkening the appearance of the water without the sky reflecting off it.  In the distance you can see ducks bobbing in the water - tougher to spot in the waves...  Looking down from the walking/bike bridge you can see the 2 different waves - the roughly parallel ones caused by shallow water running over underwater features, and the high-frequency little ones on top caused by the wind.

 

I got a fan e-mail the other day from a reader who enjoyed the 3D stereo views.  I nearly always take image pairs for stereo, and the lack of leaves opened up some views that you normally don't see in the summer.  Across the river, you could see a shelter over in the Jon Duerr Forest Preserve.  A standard image of it is shown at left.  Since it is some distance away, it appears flat - not many clues to give a sense of perspective.  But as I've tried to imply in my previous posts on 3D imaging, by taking a second identical exposure with a horizontal shift, and view one picture with each eye - presto, chango - a real 3D picture with true sense of depth!  At right is the pair of images, and as I've also implied in previous posts on the topic, I present them in a cross-eyed view.  Cross your eyes slightly so that you view the left picture with your right eye and right picture with your left.  The result will be a 3D image in the center with depth.  In this case, because of the distance to the scene, I moved about 5-6 feet horizontally between images, so it is known as a "hyper-stereoscopic" image, since the separation is more than your natural eye separation.  The cross-eyed viewing method works for the thumbnail image here with the text, or it works with the full sized image if you click on it.  Because the method works for any image size, it is what I use in the blog.

 

While the image pair works well, even looking at the full-sized image is limited in the resolution of the scene.  In this case I cropped down the image to nearly the raw-pixel resolution of the frames to enable you to see more detail.  In the image pair at left you get a better view of the 3D image, and the effect of what the baseline of the image separation gets you in defining the depth in the view.  you can plainly see the wall of trees at the shoreline separated from the more distant park shelter behind.

 

A few minutes later I was walking down along the river and saw another of my "favorite trees".  I've posted about these before - numerous in the woods here, a hackberry tree (Celtis occidentalis).  The bark is quite amazing, not only for the ridges built up on the surface, but the micro-layers on the ridges.  I'm thinking that the micro-ridges are actually growth rings manifested in the outer grooves - but then, what do I know?!  A closeup similar to above is shown at right...

 

Ambling a couple hundred yards towards the west, the trail turns uphill and approaches the visitor center, which appears to be shut down for the season, without open hours posted.  Along the way, frost appeared on the trail, and across the valley, the golden glow of the low sun was being cast in the jumble of downed leaves.  The 3D view pulls you into the scene, even the frosty glint of the leaves on the trail gives you a bit of chill...

 

Finally, with the sun still up, I hated to waste some sunshine, so after driving home, took the short walk up to where I saw signs of the beaver a few days back.  Looking for an appropriate stereo view, I shot nearly down-sun showing one of the girdled large trees and another good-sized one that was downed over the trail along the river...

 

The stereo views shown here are easy to produce.  I am pretty careful to be sure to translate smoothly and keep the camera in the same orientation.  Occasionally I have to manipulate one of the images to better match them by rotating one of them slightly, or change the image size if I wasn't careful to translate square to where I was pointing (ie, the camera was slightly closer to the object in one of the frames...).  I use an early version of Photoshop Elements (2.0 - that I got with my first DSLR at least 8 years ago).  Loading the two frames, I use the Photomerge command to set them up next to each other, which allows me to do slight shifts to align, or even overlay them to see if they can be fixed by rotating or changing image scale on one of them.  Try it if you feel inspired, but hopefully you enjoy them and don't have any issues fusing them into 3D images...