Making a crummy “emergency fader/variable ND filter” from RealD glasses
Okay, this is really only useful for some kind of weird desperate situation where you’re willing to sacrifice image quality for shallow depth of field. Or maybe you’re stranded on a desert island with your camera, but without your fader/variable ND filter. Annnnnnd you’re making a short film instead of trying to survive and/or be rescued. Annnnnnd the tropical foliage in the background is really visually distracting from your lead actress (a volleyball with a face painted on it?), and you’d really love to shoot at f/2.8 instead of f/22 (and not resort to using a crazy fast shutter speed– maybe it’s a romcom, not a WWII action drama). Annnnnd you just happen to have pocketed a pair of those RealD glasses from when you wasted $15 on Clash of the Titans 3D. This is the longest pseudo-comedic preface ever. But it’s my way of saying “Yeah, I know this is actually more just an anecdotal Mr. Wizard’s World / MacGyver thingee rather than something you’ll ever actually need to use”.
Yeah so anyway, do this:
- Pop out the flimsy “lenses”, actually filters we’ll call them.
- Flip over the right filter.
- Put the right filter in front of the left filter.
- Rotate it 90 degrees.
- Enjoy all the loss of optical sharpness, chromatic aberrations, and color shifts those cheap quality polarizers are sure to cause.
That is all. Also, I’m totally dying to know if the volleyball face lady falls in love and lives happily ever after or not.
