Adventures in 3D: My old ImageTech 3DFX
Back before I was into photography, my Mom gave me a camera as a present: An ImageTech 3DFX. It’s a plastic fixed-focus no controls camera that had three lenses. It recorded three vertical frames per click on standard 35mm film. Despite my best intentions over a decade ago, I never used it. Back then, they had a deal with Walgreens and other major photo labs to send film back to Imagetech to process. In a few weeks you’d have some 3D prints.
In the modern day, ImageTech is long gone. You can only get those prints at one lab in the world, and it takes months and a lot of money.
Or you can have fun digitizing the negatives yourself and using Photoshop to create any number of spiffy effects. The animated gif above is probably the coolest. I tried doing anaglyphs — the type of image you need 3D glasses for. The results are not spectacular with this image. I think extreme closeups don’t work so well for this technique. I’ll try again with more landscapular subjects sometime.
Also, I see I get some light leak in many of my middle frames from this old plastic cam. Hmmm.
previous post: Castledoor and Hopewell on LAist.com next post: Back to Front? Focusing on Concert Photography
Tags:imagetech 3dfx 3d anaglyph
This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Looks like a old movie, rather fond of it. Thumbs up!
That is SUPER MEGA UBER cool!
Mick! That B/W 3-image animated gif effect rocks!
The blue/red 3-D worked but I had to wear my paper 3-D glasses backwards (red=right eye, blue=left) – but perhaps that’s not backwards at all.
Hey there
I have a camera called the 3D Magic Plus – it was a disposable/recyclable (sp) deal I believe I purchased at Walgreens in 1999 – I recently found it buried in a box and desperately want to develop the fotos that lurk inside.
Any thoughts on how I should proceed?
Where I might find a place that can still do this?
e