Stereo photography has been a lifelong interest of mine.

It all started when, as a small child, I was given a Viewmaster plus a collection of reels. Having, in addition, derived much pleasure from looking at endless selections of Victorian photographs, I eventually decided I should try this myself.

Starting with a beam splitter on the end of my 35mm SLR camera, I moved on to digital stereo, using either one camera twice, or else the same camera synchronised with an identical twin camera, the latter method being essential for moving objects. Hundreds of shots later, stereo photography still gives me a lot of pleasure.

By profession, I am a freelance architectural Illustrator (www.bilfulton.com). This involves producing perspectives of proposed building and engineering developments, both hand-drawn (referred to as 'watercolours'), and computer generated (referred to as 'CGIs').

Probably that is why many of my photographs are of buildings.

Furthermore, my computer generated images, which are derived from 3D modelling anyway, translate easily into stereo versions if required.

For large images and phantograms which are pop-up models ressembling 3D isometrics (see models page), I sometimes use anaglyph images which require red and cyan spectacles. Although it is necessary in colour versions to edit out any reds and cyans in the images in order to avoid interference, on occasions it can be a very useful format.

My favourite way of viewing stereo pairs is by the cross-view or cross-eye method, which is described on the following pages for the benefit of newcomers to this format.

I cannot stress too strongly how well the technique works given a bit of practice.

It wins hands-down over other more cumbersome methods that require spectacles, shutter glasses, viewers etc.  Also, in my opinion, it is much easier than the slower parallel method where the images are restricted in size and have to be set approx 62 - 67mm apart (interocular distance).

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