His photos were taken with a standard camera, moving horizontally slightly to get a left and right image of the same thing. I had been a photographer since high school and I took one look at that show and thought, I can do this. I think the first left-right pair I took was of Trillium ovatum in my backyard! Te rest is history. Over the years I have shared 3D shows with a great many classes and public presentations. First doing the double carousel presentation but more recently using digital images and complex hardware coupled to two digital projectors (that I don’t fully understand but which, fortunately, seems to mostly work).
Why use
stereophotography? Stereophotography is the perfect
visual means to help in teaching about cryptogams. Most folks have conceptual frameworks they drape two-dimensional images of plants and animals on to make it relatively easy to form a concept about each new plant or animal they see a two-dimensional photo of. Plants stand
upright on stems, anchored by their roots in the ground and are splaying out into space in a variety of standard shapes of light-catching needles and leaves and reproductive parts. Animals (at least most vertebrates and many invertebrates) have heads and tails and supporting backs and some number of legs propelling them towards food and away from predators. But people have little conceptual
framework to hang images of cryptogams on. Even the plant features of bryophytes are so small that most people don’t usually look at them close enough to see how they fit the plant pattern and some of these don’t look like standard plants at all. Tus, a three-dimensional image of a lichen, a mushroom, a slime mold or a moss can help folks immediately relate to these organisms as beings and begin to understand how their forms take up space and function on this planet. So, I have been compiling stereoscopic views of all these cryptogams and I am happy to share some of my views of mushrooms on these pages.
Some basic pointers A few more thoughts on the process
I use to take digital stereo photographs. Tere are many resources online that get specific about these details. I have found one doesn’t need to be all that precise, except for a couple of points. Use any camera and any lens. Take a left image, move the camera to the right and take a right image. Ten use software to combine and save the pair as one. Experiment with some of the software available. My earlier article in FUNGI (Fall, 2014) discusses the rather complex details for making the pop-up anaglyph images (“phantograms,” like the cover and a few others featured here). Tere are photos in that article of the tripod and slidebar rig I use. Te descriptions below are for just plain old non- phantogram types of views. A slide bar is mounted on the bottom of a 35 mm camera (I’m presently using a Sony A7RIII mirrorless). Tis allows maintaining approximate horizontal parity between left and right shots. In each shot, position the object of interest in the center of the view and reorient
Menegazzia subsimilis. 10 FUNGI Volume 15:1 Winter 2022
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