MAY 15, WEDNESDAY

PHOTOGRAPHY IN. 3 DIMENSIONS

I feel a little odd about discussing 3D spatial movies and photographs when I can’t show anyone what I am talking about unless I put my Apple Vision Pro goggles on their head so that they can see what I am excited about. I am writing about something that no one can see except me partly for the same reason I write any of these posts. I am curious about something and write out my response to help me figure it out for myself. The second reason is that virtual reality, 3D reality floating in space is something that I believe will soon change how we see the world and communicate with each other. Up until now we have lived in flatland. Soon we will live in virtual reality mixed with actual reality which I guess is augmented reality.

The iPhone 15 Pro as it is sold won’t give you a way to take 3D photographs. But there is a free app for the iPhone available in the App Store called Spatialify which will let you take 3D photographs using the iPhone 15 Pro. Because this uses the same two lenses in landscape mode that allows you to make spatial movies with the iPhone you can only take wide, horizontal photographs. You can’t process either spatial movies or spatial photographs. You can’t crop or enhance in any way as I do with all my non spatial photographs. Cropping cuts out what you don’t want and the cropping tool allows you to level photographs and even change the perspective within photographs. In portrait mode you can change the focus. And in all modes you can enhance the lighting and brighten the colors and increase the contrast. Spatial photographs won’t allow any of this.

Now that I am getting over the early excitement of making spatial movies and spatial photographs (which almost no one else has been able to see) I can see the weaknesses of taking spatial (3D) photographs with the iPhone. But I’m also discovering that seeing spatial videos and spatial photographs through the Vision Pro goggles can at times be so different from flatscreen videos and printed photographs that they almost need a different name and virtual photographs might be as good as any.

On one hand the technical issues of the weaknesses of making both spatial videos and spatial photographs are very similar to the weaknesses of early digital photography. At first digital cameras had low resolution, were not sensitive in low light, were not good at catching rapid movement and distorted colors. Year after year these problems were overcome until now digital photography has made film photography, and Kodak, a giant company, almost disappear. The same kind of change I am guessing will happen with spatial photography and video.

With the arrival of the iPhone 15 Pro and with its ability to record spatial video and spatial photographs the ordinary person, like myself, is about to break out of the the old way of photographing into a new way of photographing. When I compare flat screen photography and videos to spatial photography and videos I don’t know quite what to make of it becasue there are ways in which spatial photography is completely different from flat screen photography. I am thinking of the Chiluly glass exhibit at the Biltmore House which I haven’t seen except for flat screen photographs. A spatial photograph of a Chiluly glass piece is so different from a flat screen photograph of the same piece that they can hardly be compared. Another example is that reproductions of great paintings done with very powerful cameras which can record and even print the roughness of the paint strokes. This is very different from a flat screen print of the same painting which we can buy in the museum store and put on our wall. But even this barely noticeable difference of reproducing the exact texture and colors of the great painting makes this form of spatial photograph somewhere between the museum print and a full reproduction which leaves no difference between this kind of print and the original itself. This kind of reproduction requires very expensive camera equipment and can be sold for thousands of dollars.

The only way to print the photographs of the Chiluly glass exhibit won’t seem like photographs at all. They will be 3D reproduction of the glass works which look and feel exactly the same as the originals. They will require a 3D printer. Or possibly, in an article about Google that I read today, what looks like a flat television screen will actually seem to have some many levels and so much depth that the full shape of the glass piece will seem to be sitting within the frame as on a shelf completely 3 dimensional.

Even I when I take a spatial photograph of a bush or a flower arrangement in a vase when I look at the photographs with my goggles one some of the flowers seem to be extending toward me out of the frame so that I feel I could reach up and touch it two inches from my nose.

This is so different from a flat photograph that I can hardly describe it for you. It is so different that I hardly know what to make of it or what to do with it. I can’t put it into a standard frame on the wall, I can’t put it on a pedestal and walk around it. All I can do is to look at it through the Vision Pro goggles and be amazed by it.