Special effects filters on the Loreo 9005 Beamsplitter

I recently got a new battery and charger for my Canon T5 DSLR so I could start taking digital stereo stills and video with it again, paired with the Loreo 9005 lens. Even though it’s practically 10 years old at this point, it delivers image quality that I find suitable for my work and of course, nothing beats the convenience of editing universally recognizable stereo image & video files..

I broke the glass on one of my lens covers a long time ago. I assumed it was plastic and that I could sort of pop it out to clean the dust off of the internal mirror systems due to years and years of constant use and abuse. I was wrong 😂

The canon T5 paired with the Loreo lens was my bread and butter for almost a decade of shooting photos & stereos of NYC’s underground house/techno party scene from about 2010-onwards (although of course back in 2010 I was shooting with a T1i and upgraded both the camera and the Loreo lens at some point to the ones I am picturing here)

I of course, never shot the camera once I removed the cover glass on the Loreo lens because dust could totally hit the sensor if I were to shoot it with it missing from the beamsplitter. The housing is essentially hollow and the two holes in the mount are open, so I picked up a handful of cheapo filters at a camera show I was dealing at a few weeks ago for the intention of covering it so I could safely shoot it.

I picked up some matched pairs of 58mm warming filters for flourecent lighting and a pair of circular polarizers, mainly with the intention of protecting my camera’s sensor when shooting. I also picked up a few special effects filters- although they are indeed mismatched filters, they happen to be pairs of the same variety types, so I thought they would be interesting to experiment with for some stereo shooting.

I have a pretty high tolerance for rivalry and wanted to experiment with them together to see if they were close enough for my level of acceptable disparity or if they were too rivalrous even for my tastes… Also, shooting mismatched pairs gives me a chance to look at twice as many results in half the shots, so that appeals to my lazy side as well.

I honestly hadn’t powered up the camera in a few years and the first thing I noticed when doing some test shots around the house was that the stereo image split seemed a bit off. It seems that my left image is a bit larger in width then my right. I might actually have to take the lens apart and readjust the mirrors as well as give it a good cleaning to remove the dust that collected in it over time. I’ll save that project for another time.

The special effects filters I got were both by Tiffen. I got a pair of diffraction filters and also a pair of soft focus filters that had a bullseye pattern sandblast etched into the glass.

This is an unmatched set of Tiffen filters from their”rayburst” series-
Left lens had “stellar” filter, the right lens had “streaker”. They are both rotating filters and you can set the directional gratings on the diffraction filters to be the same or different pitches between the two lenses.. They already seen like they will make some pretty viewable (at least to me) stereo pairs. I’m very much into gratings and will definitely be on the lookout to acquire duplicates for the Loreo

I thought these Tiffen soft focus filters were particularly interesting. The bulls eye effect is quite noticeable to me in every shot, and is ESPECIALLY noticable when freeviewing the image pairs.
The frequency of the rings seems to increase with the # indicated. The #1 filter is the one with the least amount of rings and most space between them. The #2 lens had more rings and of course, less space between each one.

I had the #1 size on the left lens and #2 on the right in these stereos below. They create quite a bit of disparity between the two stereos which may be too great for some to fuse, even I had a little difficulty with them freeviewing the back display on my camera. To make things extra difficult, I can only freeview crossed pairs, not parallel (a skill I am never looking to aquire btw, I can very easily view pairs with a magnified viewer I keep tucked into my phone case, I have heard too many people tell tale of loosing the ability to cross view and have a whole theory and series of essays coming out on this subject) so when I freeview a parallel image, I always see it in pseudo. Normally i have no problem digesting  stereo imagery this way, but this imposed mismatched set of pattern made it a bit more difficult then normal. I was able to do it once I got the hang of it, but I might not reccomend a mismatched pattern overlay like these Tiffen soft focus bullseyes, for the feint of 3D 👀

I wasn’t able to capture that many images on this outing. I had to find a blank SD card before leaving the house to test out the camera again and these filters for the first time and the only one I could find was an ancient SD card that was 128 MEGS 😂😂😂 I think I got about 30 shots total- and I had set the resolution on medium in anticipation of this.

I’ll be posting up more on the wacky filters I create with my new (old stock) gels and more about taking apart the Loreo 9005 for a CLA and mirror reset when I get around to it..

In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed this post! Thanks for reading! –ilicia