Mounting Stereo Prints

[P3D Robert Thorpe <thorpe@xxxxxxxxxx>]

There were several letters in the last digest asking about mounting stereo 
prints. Especially from Realist cameras. Perhaps you would like to have a look
at my web page concerning just that.

     http://www.netins.net/showcase/visres/3D/holmscrd.htm

A couple of other things. I live in Cedar Rapids, IA. This is a town of about
100,000 people. I have absolutely no trouble finding one-hour photolabs where
I can get access to the technicians. That is the key. If you can tell the tech
what you want, you can get stereo pairs printed. I happen to use a Nimslo but I
have 2 realists and many other stereo cameras. The Nimslo is pretty close to a
half-frame format and if the lab has a half-frame mask it solves several 
problems; color balance and exposure differences, for instance. If the prints 
are made with a full-frame mask, the tech just has to be a little more careful.

One comment I take a little exception to was Greg Wageman's, "The Realist
and Kodak were designed for slides." Certainly they are mostly used that
way, but there is
NOTHING in their DESIGN that makes them better for slides than prints. 

Many years ago now I tried a little experiment. I discovered a Kodak product
that 
was an orthocromatic, continuous-tone, sheet film. The exact product number
escapes
me at the moment but I had to special order a box. With this, I made contact 
prints of Realist B&W negs and got B&W transparencies from that. The images
were a
little flat but with more experimentation I probably could have under
exposed and
over developed the print to get better contrast and density. The emulsion was on
the wrong side but that is just a matter of focusing. The beauty of this process
was that with ortho film, it could be tray processed under regular safelights 
which allows you to monitor the progress of the development.

Robert Thorpe


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