Wallace Koopmans Artlog

There have been some strange photographic formats but one of the weirdest has to be lenticular prints. I don’t want to go to deep down that path though as I’m using the Nimslo to create animated clips instead. Simply lenticular prints reveal a slightly different view from different pairs of lenses depending on your viewing angle. So changing the angle makes the 2D image appear 3D. In my case I am just using the half frames from each lens as individual viewpoints of the same thing captured at the same time. Not really stereoscopic as both eyes see the same thing.

All that aside the Nimslo came out in the mid 1980’s and never really caught on. There has been a bit of a resurgence due to social media such as Instagram and frankly the cool look you can achieve with these. The four lenses are each f5.6 made of three glass elements with an aperture that can stop down to f22. Shutter speeds can vary from 1/30 to 1/500 second. Both aperture and shutter are automatically set by the cameras exposure system.

When you trip the shutter what you get is 4 separate images captured at the same time from slightly different angles like this.

To make an ‘wigglegram’ (a short animation that runs through the frames forwards and then back and repeats) you separate them and then bring them into some sort of photo editor to align them. This is important because there needs to be an anchor point around which the images should appear to rotate.

The result can be saved as an animated GIF like the one bellow or for more control and better quality as a video.

For the best 3D effect its good to have something in the foreground middle distance and background.