Anaglyphic 3-D with a Vivitar Series 1 Q-DOS lens

This one is a little late to be here, but there seems no longer to be a lens

forum, and there isn't anywhere else that makes more sense than here that I can

figure out, anyway. In the past, the moderator has promised us some leeway here,

too.

My Christmas present (my precious): A Vivitar Series 1 Qdos lens

Way back in 1991, Vivitar added a cyan/red filter into its Series 1 70-210mm

f/2.8-4.0 zoom lens. This allows a single lens to produce a limited form of

anaglyphic 3-D. That's the kind of 3-D that was used in comic books in the day

when. The effect is fairly limited and applies moslty to out-of-focus areas, but

still can be appreciated with red/blue glasses.

[Note, Qdos is not an operating system for computers]

I was able to get this on eBay from Poland, originally sold in the Berlin at

Foto Braune on Karl Marx Stasse. The lens had a Contax/Yashica mount, which is

probably why I got it without much competition (I've been looking, bidding and

losing for a long time now). It works just fine with a C/Y adapter on my Canon

20D. The lens came from Poland, and the adapter from Shanghai, and both arrived

in a little over a week. I'm still staggered by the universal flea market that

the world has become.

More information on the Qdos:

http://www.pauck.de/marco/photo/stereo/q-dos/q-dos.html<div></div>

Interesting - is the effect changed or diminished by the size of the resulting print? Do the prints have to be precisely colour-balanced for this to work? What does it look like under or overexposed?

(Quick bit of computer trivia - actually, QDOS *was* an operating system for PCs around the late 1970's/early 1980's - it was the original name of 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products and stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System". It was a clone of the much more advanced CP/M operating system from Digital Research, and was the product that Bill Gates bought and rebranded as "MS-DOS".)

The effect seems to work through rescaling up to the point, I suppose in which the fairly slight (depending on the scene) color fringing is lost in the pixel crunch. So far I've just left the AWB on, and things seem to work just fine.

One of the advantages of this system is that the resulting prints are viewable as 2D pictures without much sign of the very slight fringing that pops things out when viewed with the two-colored glasses.<div></div>

I love this lens!...But purely for sentimental reasons. And though I never owned this lens it opened the world of photography to me. I'm kinda a gadget geek, and a sound recording engineer by trade. Quite a few years ago I became interested in 3-D photography and read about the Q-dos. Not knowing anything about cameras, I did some reading and figured that if I got a lens with a big enough aperture I could build my own "Q-dos". SO I visited a local pawn shp and bought a Yashica Electro 35 for $10. I disassebled the lens and insereted my own blue-red filter near the back of the lens stack. And it worked! But not so well. The stereo base is not wide enough for meaningful depth, and red objects "buzz" which in this case you can't fix before anaglyph conversion. What I did learn was how the Yashica Electro worked and I learned about aperture and film and exposure and cameras, and why the Yashica photos were so much better than the P&S photos. This led to a love and appreciation of classic cameras and classic photography. You can see some low res examples of my single lens 3D work and more 3D and 2D photos at

<a href="http://www.pbase.com/bgussin">http://pbase.com/bgussin</a>

In a pinch you can use red and cyan translucent file folder tabs from any office supply outlet to view the anaglyphs (usually red-left, blue right)

-Bob G<div></div>

The basket case is a fine picture, Robert. It has a lovely painterly quality. Thanks for the pointer to your site.

I'm a certified stereo 'connoisseur' (read, nut) myself. I have found that you can use the Pentax Stereo adapter on a digital camera if you use a 28 or 35mm lens instead of the 50mm it was designed for on full format cameras. I've also got a nice Stereo Realist.

For those interested in 3-D stuff:

http://home.att.net/~drt-3d/toys/realist/index.htm

http://www.ray3dzone.com/<div></div>