You know, I really didn’t think that would work. Having brought out the wonderful W1 3D digital camera, Fuji has also set up a lenticular printing service. The maximum size is 7″ x 5″ at present but bespoke lenticular printing is prohibitively expensive for starving artists. After a bit (actually, a lot) of work, I managed to reverse-engineer the .MPO file format used by the camera and sent some test images off for printing. They’ve just arrived back…


Obviously, a normal screen can’t show the depth but out of the three images, this was the process that returned real depth. The butterfly appears to float about a centimetre above the foliage. There are limitations to this system, however. It only uses two lenses as opposed to the three or four used in earlier lenticular systems and modern systems make use of up to 32 frames to convey solidity to objects. There’s also a degree of guesswork involved. The process won’t allow images to stand in front of the plane, so it takes the nearest image and counts back from that. I’m not quite sure how deep it can go before it starts breaking up.
Anyway, I’ve submitted another fourteen images for processing. A few of these are test shots but I’m fervently hoping that at least two will be suitable for the R.A. submission this year. The deadline is fast approaching so it’s going to be tight…