(Almost) 3D view of Háifoss waterfall, Iceland

Haífoss, Iceland. Animated gif file may not animate in some browsers / mobile devices.  Click image for larger version.

Háifoss is Iceland’s second highest waterfall, with a drop of 122 metres.  It’s name means ‘Milky elfin vomit spout’ in Icelandic.  Not really; it’s ‘High waterfall’.  People seem to enjoy the myth that Icelanders believe in elves.  It is located inThjorsadalur, about an hour northeast of Selfoss. Hjálparfoss and Gjáin are in the same area. Note: If you are a tourist photographing a waterfall in Iceland, please don’t complain about the rain.

I took this (almost) 3D image of Háifoss by accident. Flicking between two photographs taken at slightly different places along the path gives an impression of depth. According to Wikipedia, this is due to the motion parallax effect.  Objects in the foreground move further than those in the distance.

The animation was created with the ImageMagick software. This is a command line based tool for rotating, cropping and resizing images, and much more. It is Free/Open Source software, so you can download and install it on as many machines as you like.  I previously wrote a post explaining how to annotate and join images e.g. to make multipart figures for scientific papers. The command used to make the Háifoss animation is:

convert -loop 0 -delay 60 Háifoss_1.jpg Háifoss_2.jpg Háifoss3D.gif