I recently had the opportunity to do some photography work for a company in need of a unique advertising piece for a direct mail campaign. The idea was to include anaglyphic 3D postcards (with coupons printed on the back) along with red/cyan 3D glasses.

For this job, I needed more manual control than my small Canon A480 SDM rig could provide, so I built a twin rig from a pair of Sony A55 DSLRs. I already owned one with an 18-55mm kit lens, and was able to find a second one with the same lens at a decent price on Ebay. I also purchased a twin-mount slide bar, a handle and a couple of cheap wired remotes. 

Two of these and a double-ended remote cable and you are good to go!I had expected I would need to hack together both remote cables to one trigger, but to my surprise I discovered that by simply using a coupler to connect the remote cables to each other (creating one long cable with a remote plug on each end), I could connect the cameras to each other with the cable and fire both cameras by using either shutter button. 

This simplified the rig considerably and allowed me to just press the right-side camera shutter button as I normally would with a single camera setup. As long as I offset the exposure metering on one of the cameras to match the center of the other camera's frame center, and waited for both cameras to auto-focus, it behaved the same as any StereoDataMaker rig that I've used. Stopwatch tests showed sync to be within 1/1000 second. Not bad!

I did have to do some testing to find the right subject distance and focal length, considering the bulkier size of the camera bodies and larger lenses. I settled on 24mm (35mm equivalent for this camera) and a 7-8' subject distance with the cameras as close together as possible in landscape and about 6' in portrait. For wider shots I approximated the 1/30 rule and slid the cameras further apart as needed. These guidelines provided a slightly hyper stereo effect, which worked well with the small size of the printed postcards.

The shoot was a lot of fun. My job was to grab interesting 3D shots in between setups on a music video they were shooting for the ad campaign.They gave me lots to work with, so it was easy to find great shots.

Below are a couple of behind-the-scenes shots and one of the postcads images we used.