Stereo photography with Leica & Zeiss lenses and M digital cameras

[verbivore]

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For people like me who have two eccentricities: stereo photography and Leica equipment - there are several ways of combining them by taking stereo photos with a digital Leica M. The easiest is the two-step method (put your weight on your left leg, snap, shift it to your right leg, snap), or to use a focus or stereo rail. Leica used to make a beautiful one, the FIATE Stereoly slide bar: 

Leica made a Stemar twin-lens device with a prism separator attachment ("beam-splitter"), though they're not easy to find. I got one at an auction. For macro shots I bought an extra dedicated Stemar hood on eBay and epoxied on a step-up ring that takes Elpro closeup lenses.

Zeiss Ikon made something similar, the Stereotar, which is cheaper and more widely available, but requires a Contax-rangefinder-to-M adapter--and it has to be for the external Contax RF bayonet, not the internal one. I modified one of the Chinese adapters from eBay, and Rafcamera is now making them. There are dedicated close-up lenses of various strengths.

Zeiss Ikon also made a standalone splitter, the Steritar , which can be screwed on to a lens (35mm focal length works best) with a 34X43 step-up ring or Rafcamera's 34X49dedicated adapter. It's cheaper and widely available than the Stemar or Stereotar, though with some compromise in image quality. Leica also made a standalone splitter, the Stereoly, though it mounted to the hot shoe of a Leica II or IIIa, and there's no obvious way of mounting it to a modern M.  

With all these devices, the side-by-side half-frame portrait-mode images are easily processed by Stereo Photo Maker Pro. With the high resolution of Leica digital rangefinders (e.g., 60 mpix for the M11), the half-images have plenty of resolution, even after cropping.

I've made many stereo images with these setups (identifiable from the EXIF metadata, manually entered with Directory Opus). Here is a sample, compressed and reduced in size (the originals and many more are displayed in my web galleries )

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[jankap]

Beautiful pictures.

The disadvantage of the Stemar is the portrait mode. But the sensors get more and more pixels, so cropping is becoming an option. I often use the other mentioned method left/right picture, with the problem of the time difference. The best results I get with the Lytro Illum camera, with the disadvantage of the relatively low pixel number; see RFF, user jankapp

Edited September 19, 2022 by jankap

[verbivore]

Thanks! Yes, I appreciate the tradeoffs. I've gotten used to the portrait mode with the Stemar, Stereotar, Steritar, and Stereoly, which is easier to fuse, and in a way consistent with our stereoscopic perception, which is bounded on each side by our nose. 

The two-step method does give you wider images out of the camera, but I've been surprised by how many stereo pairs are affected by subject movement, even landscapes. Waterfalls, rivers, and windblown leaves, branches, and grass result in chaotic 3-D textures, because the movement between shots gets converted into spurious depth (like my Yosemite Falls shot), and windblown clouds can leap into a plane hovering in front of the backdrop, like this two-step shot of El Capitan:

https://www.stevepinker.com/Stereo/Yosemite-stereo/i-GxJSvPX/A

Is it easy to get stereo pairs out of a Lytro? I hadn't realized that was possible but I guess the parallax info is in the light field, so it makes sense. 

[shanefking]

Absolutely stunning!  I especially loved the frog!

I have a stereoscopic adapter for an asahi pentax slr, that screws on to the front of a 50mm lens.   I wonder if I could adapt that to my M…

 

I’ve been working on a series of augmented reality “virtual shadowboxes” to create a virtual 3-d photo that can be simulated in a real space using one’s phone as a viewer.  
 

try this link on your mobile device, it will download the Adobe Aero app, and then you can set it to appear on a wall 

https://adobeaero.app.link/ZXVPfgDJYvb

 

 

 

 

[verbivore]

Thanks, Shane! I used to have that Pentax adapter. I am pretty sure you could adapt it to a Leica M with the right step-up ring - 39 or 46mm to 49 or 52mm, depending on which lens and version of the stereo adapter you have. You'd have to manually adjust the orientation of the adapter to horizontal before shooting, and there may be some vignetting or keystoning or both, but Stereo Photo Maker Pro can correct them automatically. Based on my experience with a Zeiss Steritar (another stereo splitter) you may have better results with a 35mm lens, though it will require more aggressive removal of the vignette. 

I'll try the AR app - sounds intriguing.