He might be best known for his day job, playing guitar in one of the world’s biggest rock bands, but May also holds a doctorate in astrophysics and is a lifelong fan of stereo photography, a photographic process which creates 3D images from prints or digital images. May has now combined his two his biggest passions to create a book that charts the Soviet-American race to our nearest neighbour in all its 3D glory.
The LSC has already published several books about 3D photography, but May says this is their most ambitious yet. “No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”
The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could later be turned into 3D images.
“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those."
“For me it’s a passion, I’m completely geeky where this is concerned so if we’re on tour with Queen I’ll be back in the hotel at 3am trying to put two of these images together that Claudia has sent me and make them work as a 3D. That’s what you see in the book. I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181019-the-space-race-like-youve-never-seen-it-before
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