June 10, 2021

Historical Stereo Extractions

The scenes from his­toric doc­u­men­taries pre­sent­ed here were up until now only view­able in 2D, but thanks to the hor­i­zon­tal move­ment of the cam­era and/or the object with­in the video, I was able to ‘extract’ stereo pairs by com­bin­ing select­ed stills with­out the use of (arti­fi­cial) manip­u­la­tion. As a result, I was able to cre­ate 3D images from 2D video, in some cas­es almost a cen­tu­ry “after the fact”.

The Graf Zep­pelin (1933)
The (zep­pelin-moor­ing) mast on top of the Empire State Build­ing in New York, used as an exper­i­men­tal mail pick-up point by GoodYear blimps
(1931)
Air­ship pio­neer and com­man­der Hugo Eck­en­er in the Graf Zep­pelin dur­ing the Round-the-World flight (1929)
View of the Dutch town Zwolle in 1925 (1925)
Aer­i­al view of Lon­don, West­min­ster — to the right is the Thames, under­neath is the St John’s church at the Smith Square (1921)
‘Olle’ Bennström (r.) and mechan­ic in his Ford Spe­cial at the Swe­den Win­ter Grand Prix (1933)

© 2021 Her­bert Verhey

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Herbert Verhey (Seminyak, Bali)

The first stereo image ever I made was with a sin­gle cam­era, by mov­ing it a bit to the side, tak­ing one pho­to and then anoth­er and com­bin­ing the two prints for cross-eye view­ing. Lat­er on, after hav­ing made hun­dreds of stereo slides with a dou­ble set of pock­et cam­eras mount­ed side-by-side on an alu­minum strip, I began exper­i­ment­ing with sin­gle cam­era imag­ing again, expand­ing my tech­nique to use 2D (his­tor­i­cal) movies/videos as a source. Some of my first results using this method were pub­lished in 1998. This extrac­tion tech­nique, togeth­er with with my pas­sion for air­craft and air­ships result­ed in dozens of unique “stereo extrac­tions” as I call them, some of which I pub­lished in a book (Zep­pelins in 3D, 2019), and also on Insta­gram. I have also been exper­i­ment­ing with apply­ing the same extrac­tion method to music videos and I pub­lish those images on Insta­gram as well.

Insta­gram-pro­file: her­bertver­hey (his­tor­i­cal extrac­tions), darealthing3d (music video extractions)

Filed Under: Gallery