I have said this here only once before: Oh my frickin’ god do I love this photo. I guess that should technically be “these photos,” but I love them because they are, when you do that Magic Eye thing crossing your eyes just a little bit, 3D.

The layers of depth are remarkable. Those little puffs are right up front; that nice big fluffy cloud has its own sense of depth. The ground below recedes to the horizon perfectly. A few other clouds float here and there between us and those contrails in the distance. (The contrails and the cirrus clouds are too far away to show up in 3D.)

This is a pretty comfortable size for you to try it even on a laptop, and a phone works really well too. Phone screens are glossy, and you should try to avoid reflections. If it feels too big for you to nail it, you can push the screen away or hold it a little farther out. Use that big cloud in the middle as your eyes’ focal point and the rest will fall into place.

I’ve long been interested in 3D photography; every time I take my DSLR out, the first two photos I take are handheld 3D shots, moving the camera a few inches to the right for the second shot. They’re partly test shots to make sure I haven’t forgotten to adjust any settings, but they’re also a chance to indulge my love for 3D photography. Once I step into the nature preserve, I’m reacting to what’s going on around me, and chances are pretty good that whatever bit of nature I’m photographing, it won’t give me the time to take two photographs to get the effect properly. Noticing, as I was saving a bunch of recent photos into my gallery app, that my timing on these gave me some real possibilities — that got me excited, and I’ll confess that when I saw the small clouds in this pair of photos leap out at me and the others recede, I shouted “Oh!”

June 29, 2025. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 13.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 70mm), f/2.6, 1/540, ISO 50.