Photography by Eric Scanlen
Web site and some anaglyphs by John Wattie.
Slide show anaglyphs by Matthew Reeves.
The bane of amateurs are professionals who keep changing the names.
New names are given here (January 2008) with old names on the species pages.
Matthew Reeves (USA) spontaneously volunteered (by e-mail) to turn Eric Scanlen's stereoscopic images into anaglyphs. They are presented here as a
You will need red/cyan goggles to see the show in 3D
X stereo means cross eye 3D and allows Free viewing with no optical aid.
U stereo is parallel eye 3D, done by looking into the distance through the two images. You may need a viewer for U stereo, unless you sit well back from the monitor.
X and U stereo may be combined as a triplet.
M stereo means mirror viewing for 3D.
View the right image directly and the left image in a mirror.
M stereo is good for beginners.
Works best with a thin or front surface mirror or a 90 degree prism.
W stereo. Wobble 3d can be created from 3d image pairs, as here, but is better done with images especially photographed for motion 3d. (A very advanced version is found here.)
Anaglyph means red/cyan goggles must be used, red on the left eye.
Anaglyphs do NOT have correct colours. Nearly everybody who has normal colour vision can see anaglyphs in 3D, so they are sometimes shown to encourage beginners in stereoscopic viewing.
Stereoscopic photography can be set up from the start to make anaglyphs rather than stereo pairs. In this way the anaglyph looks very close to the real orchid, with remarkably true colours, and yet when looked at through red / cyan goggles it stands out in 3D. The original stereo photography and image processing in this example is by John Wattie who was photographing fungi along the Workman Track and could not resist taking this orchid too. Winter 2005 it is growing vigorously on both sides of Workman road, including the Kauri plot, but has also been seen in Kauri Glen on the North Shore during yet another fungal foray. Mycology people photograph orchids when mushrooms are scarce while orchid fans photograph fungi when they cannot locate orchids. This way the day is not wasted. (Actually, a day in the bush for city folk is never wasted.)
Hello John,
Spot-on identification; impressive anaglyph too. I didn’t know it was common over on Workman’s Track. This is where Pterostylis cardiostigma comes up later in the season, also Pt. graminea on the old track leading off to the west. It is curiously rare in the Hunuas. Pt. brumalis or Diplodium brumale as it has lately been called but not many are taking any notice, grows in the marked kauri plot on the other side of the river where once it was rare but now it is common. D. alobulum, on the other hand was once common there and is now undetectable. I suspect the possums like one and not the other. Brian Tyler called yesterday on the occasion of a triumphant orchid hunt at Awhitu. He had a print of your Diplodium brumale and I had it on screen so it got analysed along with all the rest.
Have you noticed red
blobs in the background? We, who are now analglyph experts(?) reckon
that the red bits in the image indicate a lack of "fusion" alignment.
In particular, one of my pairs had a stick in the B/G which had one red
image and one bluish when ones eyes were fused on the flower. Fusing on
the stick immediately brought about a true coloured, brownish image.
Aha! That points to red blobs in the pix being B/G areas with too much
"deviation" to fuse, eh? A good way out of this dilemma is to insert a
close B/G before photographing. I run into the same dilemma (disturbing
B/G) with polarised viewing and can usually find a blob of moss or a
fern frond or etc. to insert to avoid this. Alternatively, pinning the
subject to moss covered ground with a suitable twig would give you a
"fusible" B/G whilst still giving adequate depth to the subject.
Pterostylis brumalis has been changed to Diplodium brumale by David Jones and Mark Clements, Australian botanical taxonomists paid by their Government to study orchids. Pterostylis is still the largest genus here but there are now also 4 Diplodium, two Hymenochilus, one Linguella and one Plumatochilos where only Pterostylis stood before. Jones’ and Clements’ team has been analysing non-coding DNA from particular sites in the genome of as many native orchids as they could lay their hands on. They insist that morphological characters take precedence over the DNA but curiously the DNA family trees largely mimics the morphological trees so they took the plunge and renamed a huge number of Australasian orchids — without fully describing them — much to the horror of everyone who has spent a lifetime learning the stupid names.
The NZ Native Orchid Group have not fully accepted all their new names including Diplodium brumale and the old ones are still legitimate but I reckon it is only a matter of time. My Journals index has accepted all except Petalochilus for Caladenia which has been demonstrated by Hopper & Brown to be in error. NZ’s Dr. Brian Molloy has been working hand in glove with Jones and Clements, supplying specimens and expertise but working from Chch, so our orchid IDs tend to have a S.I./Oz flavour. *
Eric.
*Chch = Christchurch. S.I./Oz = South Island / Australia
Eric does not use the macro-photography technique advocated on this web site and explains how he works in the field.
Since you ask, I have thought of photographing orchids with no toe-in and rejected the idea. Why:-
Fairly cumbersome, which is a deterrent for field photography.
Yesterday, for instance I drove 255km to Murupara, and got driven to Minginui plus a bit by DoC workers then tramped a km or so horizontally but down about 300m, into the native forest for Drymoanthus flavus which I hadn’t managed to capture in 50 years of orchid hunting. My pack was killing me with basic safety gear, lunch, one camera and one mini tripod which was useless: the orchids were all up too high. One guy had an elaborate tripod with which he just managed on one plant after we built a platform of rotten limbs. Had we thought of taking in cord for binding tripods to tree trunks it might have helped. This chicken decided to start home ahead of the party to save holding them up on the climb out. Soon I got down a leading spur instead of the ridge and cost myself double the amount of climbing to get out again, all with pack on back. Gear has to be strictly limited or else take a young packman with you.
With about 2° toe-in, but using only normal to tele. lenses, key-stoning is minimal. With extension tubes, even my 28mm lens, reversed for big magnifications, becomes a narrow angle lens and key-stoning is hardly discernable, even when projected with parallel lenses. Have you had to correct my stereo pairs for key-stoning? It shouldn’t normally be enough to worry even anaglyph. The only times I struck trouble was:-
· with about a 35mm lens setting on a model traction engine; no close-up tubes. I warned members about it in the folio notes. Comments came back; “What do you mean? Couldn’t see any problem.” I could see the key-stoning clearly enough when I was mounting them; viewers didn’t notice a thing;
· with a frame splitter. The images cross in the camera to give L & R pictures correctly oriented when the images are turned right-way-up so toe-in and key-stoning are chronic. Don’t bother with a frame splitter.
I do get a small change of subject distance at times with hand holding because my subject distance is maintained only by keeping a chosen detail in sharp focus on full aperture with fixed manual focus. This is usually accurate enough but on occasions, I have to zoom one projector a little, especially with verticals, to keep the deviation horizontal on screen. Hand holding is actually better in this respect than loosening the screw on a round slide-bar to toe-in. All hail the SLR! A round slide bar is a trap, especially with a camera on auto focus.
With very small flowers — and there are several — I fix the camera to the tripod and rotate the subject 2° per shot on a protractor. With parallel lens layout, you should move the subject horizontally say 0.2mm per shot if 3 or 4 mm gives full screen width.
My D. flavus flowers were maybe 4mm wide and no removals were allowed due to the rarity of the beast so it was a real struggle and I have my fingers crossed until the films get processed. My final attempt was on 4 flowers, which I could actually see properly in the focusing screen. One flower in the shade was just too dark to even find! I had the off-camera-flash locked against the tree with one hand whilst I held the camera and fired with the other hand. Somewhat wobbly but the flash kills camera shake. It was photography under difficulties where a slide bar would have been next to impossible.
For most of New Zealand's orchids (monoscopic, small size)
http://www.nativeorchids.co.nz/
For more tiny plants on the forest floor, try John Wattie's:
3D fungi
For information on stereoscopic photography try:
stereoscopic home page