When you are overwhelmed with the beauty of a dead scene, like a landscape with no running water nor a living creature, a scull in the desert or a flower in still weather, you should absolutely use the opportunity to shoot it in 3D by taking two pictures from two perspectives. Here are a few things to keep in mind when doing so.
1. Think about the distance between the two photos.
A rule of thumb is to put your weight on your left foot, shoot, put your weight on the right foot and shoot. The distance between the two shots, that is the stereobase, should ideally be equal to the distance between your eyes, which for adult humans is around 6,5cm on average. For a landscape scene with distant mountains you may want to increase the stereobase or else you will not get much 3D effect. When shooting macroimages of a flower for example, you may want to decrease the stereobase to make it more comfortable to watch the image in 3D.
2. Tilting
You are pretty safe if you don't tilt the camera between the two shots. If you want to get wild, let the camera rotate around the object you are focusing on. It will be more difficult to focus on things far behind it and in front of it, but when looking at this focus object, it is pretty stunning. You may want to keep only that object in focus to guide the user to focus on it. We will write a separate post about this effect.
3. Manual settings
To get the same lighting and focus on both images, we recommend using manual settings.
There are many reasons to use this method when you have the opportunity (lifeless scene). You will be using the whole image sensor, you can control both the depth of field and the stereobase and can get the most stunning 3D images.