In this episode we play with some trippy Kaleidoscope glasses I bought on Amazon. The hack is pretty simple: just hover your glasses over your lens and voila! Instant surreal, abstract imagery with just one click and no fancy Photoshop.
WHY KALEIDOSCOPE GLASSES?
Thanks to following a really cool experimental wedding photographer named Sam Hurd (go check him out), I began playing a lot with prisms and really loved the effect. I like using a simple prism to create abstract reflections in my work, but I really wanted to see what would happen with more beveled glass… which is what motivated me to get the kaleidoscope lenses.
SELF PORTRAITS
I’m a member of a social group for photographers in Costa Rica (I highly recommend joining photography network groups in your area), and we had a self-portrait assignment due the same week as we were filming the episode. So I figured two birds, one stone. I tried the glasses out to take some wacky self-portraits. I leaned over the camera because I wanted to have just a simple background – the sky – and I also figured tossing my hair would add some extra dimension to the photos. I really liked that some are more whimsical and some are more demonic.
When I turned the glasses to the concave side of the lenses, it gave me a completely different effect than when I tried the convex side.
I accidentally left the aspect ratio at 16:9 but kind of liked the more panoramic look. I edited these images with a custom warming filter I created in Alien Skin Exposure. While I like to do as much a possible within the camera, I usually polish my photos with either Lightroom or Exposure or both.
I liked that when I put my eye in the middle of the kaleidoscope lens it gave me 20 eyes. The slower shutter speed also blurred the effect in a trippy way.
THEN I GAVE DEREK 10 HEADS AND IT LOOKED EVEN MORE COOL!
I wanted to see what would happen if I took a photo of a subject in the distance. So, I set up things up so our handsome producer/videographer/editor Derek was silhouetted and voila! Eight or nine heads and he still looks cute! I only played for a few seconds to create these trippy images.
ISO 200 | f8 | 1/3200th second – Convex side towards the lens
WHERE CAN YOU GET THESE NIFTY KALEIDOSCOPE GLASSES?
I purchased these glasses on Amazon, but I’m sure you can get them at any dollar or party store in your town. Since falling in love with the kaleidoscope effect, I’ve now ordered some colored glasses which will greet me when I’m home in Victoria next month. We’ll do an updated video with the colored glasses effect. Yee haw!
