As it’s Thursday as this is being published, this post can be considered to be another 3-D Thursday feature. I haven’t focused on creating this style of image in some time.  This week, however, Krista Stevens gave me the perfect opening to share some of  my favorites. In the photo challenge, she asks us to share our own concepts of “experimental.” Her choice of theme this week is wide-ranging and open. You can read the challenge post here. Her challenge gives me the opportunity to reprise the collection of images that I call 3-D pop-outs. I first saw the concept of a pop-out on a photo sharing site and thought it would be an interesting exercise in processing. The above image is probably my favorite example, it’s actually a blend of two separate images, the bugler is a statue inside the Arlington Cemetery visitor center and the scene is obviously one of the sections of the veteran’s cemetery.

It was a bit of a trick to learn how to do these images. Looking on YouTube, I found many examples of how to do the procedure in Adobe Photoshop. My problem is that I don’t use Photoshop. My usual editor is Adobe Lightroom, but I use Photoshop Elements for more complex editing. The step-by-step videos for creating the pop-outs in Photoshop didn’t work because the menu choices aren’t the same and some of the features of the larger program are missing.

As a result, it was quite an experiment to create my first pop-outs. I had to think about the concept and find the tools, all pretty similarly named in Photoshop Elements, but not necessarily in the same places. Fortunately the use of layer masks operates in a similar fashion in both programs so I was able to adapt that part of the process simply. The photo of the grave of Ira Hayes above is the first photo that I converted. Its straight-forward and simple lines made the learning process easier.

The gallery of images below features some of my favorite 3D pop-out images. For awhile, I posted one of these images on “3-D Thursday.” Not all subjects lend themselves to the process which really requires one central element to pop out of the background. I submit for your review a small gallery of my favorite experiments in 3-D pop-out photographs. In most browsers, click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

In the 1960’s, the Worlds Fair was a big deal. The honor of hosting the fair went to Seattle in 1962 and an ambitious construction schedule had it built in 400 days. When it was built, it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River.

The tip of the needle is 605 feet above ground level and the observation deck is at 520 feet. Built at a cost of only $4.5 million USD, the structure was revitalized in 2000 for a cost of $20 million USD. These bits of trivia about the Space Needle and many more can be found here.

About the photo: It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a 3-D popout, and I struggled a bit remembering the conversion procedure. After a couple of false starts, I finally got it together. The image was captured from a few blocks away. It was taken with a Samsung S5 cellphone at f/2.6; 1/3500 sec. ISO-80. The 3-D effect was created in Photoshop Elements and the conversion to Black-and-White was done in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.

John Steiner

Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Bodie Island.

Off the coast of North Carolina, a collection of islands hug the United States mainland coastline. Collectively, these islands are known as the Outer Banks. Connected by bridges, three major islands attract summer vacationers by the thousands. To protect navigation along the coast, a battery of lighthouses warn ships of the island hazards to navigation. The lighthouse most commonly featured in stories and photos is arguably the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. However, the Bodie Island Lighthouse has probably a more interesting location. You can read more about Bowdie Island and the lighthouse in my post from January 2016 here.

About the photograph:  As usual, these 3D popouts are created in Adobe Photoshop Elements. A sharp eye may notice the precisely square corners on the border around the background perspective. Previous 3D Thursday images had rounded corners. This week I upgraded from Elements 12 to Elements 14. The Style function used to create the white frame has more options, one of which allows squared rather than rounded corners. In this image, I used a Lightroom trick to “illuminate” the light. By using a selective brush in the glass area on top of the lighthouse, I adjusted the exposure in the selected area to overexpose and wash out the detail. That trick gives the appearance the light is operating. Finally, I used a radial gradient layer to give the appearance that the light is generating a white beam toward the back of the image.

John Steiner

Just west of the Phoenix Arizona metro, travelers will find the largest Maricopa County Regional Park, White Tank Mountain Regional Park. Mountains in the park rise to about 4,000 feet (1219 m) above sea level. In the park hikers, bikers and horseback riders will find many miles of trail for their use. Park fees are a reasonable $6 per carload as this is being written. Annual passes are also available.

If you hike the Waterfall Canyon Trail, you can view a collection of petroglyphs likely left by residents of the area over a millenia ago. You can read more about the White Tank Mountain Regional Park here.

About the photo:

The above capture of a White Tank Mountain Sunset wasn’t actually taken in the park. It was captured in an open area a few miles from the park. From where this photo was taken, it would be a pretty good stretch to hike to the park, but it could be done in a day. The image was captured with a Samsung cellphone, edited in Lightroom and converted to 3D popout in Photoshop Elements.

John Steiner

Summer is burgeoning the upper midwestern United States. Tired of the cold winters, residents of the area look forward to travelling to lakes country to enjoy the beauty of Minnesota’s legendary 10,000 lakes.

North of Park Rapids, Minnesota, travelers will find Itasca State Park. Minnesota’s first park is large enough to house over 100 lakes, but that’s not the park’s claim to fame. Lake Itasca has an outlet, visible in the image above on the right. Water drains between those stones into a relative trickle headed southerly for over 2500 miles (4023 km), all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. You might have heard of this river, the mighty Mississippi. At Lake Itasca, visitors can cross the Mississippi on those rocks without getting their feet wet. I’ve published a couple of blog posts about the park here at Journeys, both fall color trips, but summer is beautiful in its own right. You can view other photos of the park here and here.

About this photo:

We were visiting the park for an overnight stay and went to the Mississippi headwaters around sunset. The air was calm but a bit cool, not uncommon in September. This photo was captured with my Samsung S6 cell phone, edited in Lightroom and processed to a 3D popout in Photoshop Elements.

John Steiner

Baron Von Richthofen, the German ace with 80 known kills was amazingly not the legendary Red Baron this aircraft was named for. Between 1979 and 2007, Schwan Food Company promoted their Red Baron Frozen Pizza line with a squadron of six Boeing Stearman aircraft. The aerobatic team thrilled audiences at air shows as a team of four aircraft in flight. The six aircraft and equipment were sold when the team disbanded.

According to the Dickinson (North Dakota) Press, airplane number 5 was rebuilt by Paul and Jarrod Lindeman, brothers and owners of North Valley Aircraft in Valley City, North Dakota. The company is a full-featured aviation business with sales, maintenance, crop spraying and air shows featured on their website. The Red Baron aircraft is featured in one image on their Air Show page, though it’s a frontal view so the Red Baron name is not visible in the photo.

This image was originally captured in July 2015, at the Fargo Air Sho, where the Red Baron restored aircraft was again tearing up the skies in an aerobatic demonstration at the Fargo Airport.

About the photo conversion:

This conversion to a 3D popout was a lot more work than usual given that the blue background had to disappear between all the struts and wires running between the upper and lower wing assemblies. The gradient fill I usually use is a vertical gradient, however the light on the aircraft was clearly from behind so I thought it might be interesting to feature a radial gradient that suggests a sunlit background.

John Steiner

A true-life ghost town near Apache Junction draws large crowds daily. In the morning shadows of the Superstition Mountains, the ghost town thrives on the tourists who come the relatively short drive from Phoenix, Mesa and other nearby cities. 

One of the major attractions of the ghost town is the Goldfield Mine Tour. The 25-minute tour brings you underground and back in time to over a century ago. Today’s 3D image features an old outhouse sitting next to a box of explosives ostensibly for use in the nearby mine. Tourists walk by these “artifacts” on their way to the mine entrance. Tour guides on the mine tour share the history of the mine, mining processes and mining equipment of the day. The ghost town’s trip advisor rating is 4 stars, and a good day’s family entertainment. My wife and I have brought guests to visit the ghost town on a couple of occasions. You can read more about one of our earlier visits on my blog here.

John Steiner

The former estate of Robert E. Lee is now the final resting place for nearly half a million veterans, statesmen and their families. From the eternal flame at the grave of John F. Kennedy to the Tomb of the Unknowns, a history of the United States unfolds in the names and years on the headstones. A visit to Arlington is sure to be an emotional journey. Today’s 3D Thursday features a scene from the cemetery juxtaposed with a bugler blowing taps in honor of the fallen.

The bugler is not human. It is one of the most lifelike sculptures I have ever seen. The life sized statue is housed in the main administration building lobby in a plexiglas case. He stands forever with his lips to his bugle, unmoving and silently playing to everyone who passes by. This 3D photo is a departure from the norm in that I normally take one of the objects from within the image to enlarge and expand upon the borders of the photograph. Though the bugler is an interesting subject, the background in the administration lobby isn’t exactly photogenic. It made sense in this case to “move” the statue outside and place him in the midst of the heroes that he salutes. You can view my gallery of images taken at Arlington here.

All of my 3D popout images are created in Photoshop Elements. As it turned out, even though I had a lot of photos taken around the grounds at Arlington, it turned out that virtually all of them were shot with the light coming from the left. The bugler clearly is standing with his back to the light. I was almost done with processing my chosen image when I realized that the shadows on the gravestones were falling “the wrong way.” My first thought was to flip the background image horizontally, but realized that close inspection would show the writing on the gravestones to be backward. Similarly, flipping the bugler would have made him to be left handed. Fortunately, I had a single acceptable shot that was taken with light coming from the right, causing shadows to be cast in the correct direction. I hope you like my attempt at creating a scene at Arlington.

John Steiner

Some 1135 miles (1826 km) due south of Hawaii, a small coral atoll is one of the closest landfalls to the 50th state in the United States. Fanning Island, as the British named Tabuaeran, is one of the most exotic places we’ve ever visited. For a number of years, the island, part of the Line Islands chain, found itself on the itinerary of Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL), a weekly stop due to an old United States Maritime Law. The cruise ships are mostly gone these days leaving the 2500 or so residents without the regular income they enjoyed from the visitors arriving via cruise ships. One of the remnants of NCL’s regular visits is an elementary school built for the permanent residents in partial compensation for bringing cruise passengers to the island.

A coral atoll is a ring-shaped coral island that surrounds a relatively shallow lagoon. The coral island of Tabuaeran is governmentally controlled by the Republic of Kiribati, an Island government comprised of 33 coral atolls. The capital of the Republic is Tarawa, known by many history aficionados for World War II combat. The total population of the Republic is over 100,000 as of 2013.

The photo above features the rusting remains of a shipwreck, long ago abandoned. I searched in vain trying to find out details of the shipwreck on the Internet. I guess the Internet isn’t knowledgeable about everything! You can read about our trip and visit my Tabuaeran gallery of images here.

John Steiner

Standing guard above the east end of the Phoenix metro, the 3,000-foot (900 m) Superstition Mountains is a place of legends, of Jacob Walz, the Lost Dutchman Mine and incomplete treasure maps.

Even today, thousands travel every year in the search of the missing mine and the gold that legend says is waiting to be discovered. Some have found “gold” in the sale of mining gear, even in the souvenir maps purporting to lead the bearer to possible wealth and untold riches. There are many attractions in the area today. On occasion, my wife and I spend a weekend in and near the mountains, but we always stay on published trails. We leave the prospecting to others who are chasing the dream.

There is a dark side to the Superstitions. Every year there are people who seek the fortune and lose their lives in the bargain. Another legend says the mountains protect their treasure. Abandoned mines, caves and the diamondback rattlesnake are but a few of the hazards of the mountains for those foolish enough to think they might find their fortune where so many others have not.

The view of the Superstitions in the image above is my first panoramic view converted to 3D pop-out.  This view is looking east from the Apache Trail highway. The highway is one of Arizona’s iconic scenic drives, originally a stagecoach trail.   AZ 88 winds it’s 40 miles of mostly unpaved road through magnificent views of the mountains and the saguaro forests. Don’t bring your RV or motor home. You won’t like the result of this mistake. You can read about one of our weekends in the Superstitions here.

John Steiner