Not so bad after all....

[P3D Dr. George A. Themelis <DrT-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am done with the preliminary mounting of all 34 rolls.  It was quite 
a job but I managed to mount 22 rolls on Saturday and the rest today.

"Preliminary" means that all rolls are cut and mounted in Albion 
aluminum mounts but not taped yet.  In the past, when I was using the 
Albion mounts exclusively, I would go through the pictures again and 
again, rejecting some and taping the ones I decide to keep, until I 
was done.  Now, I will transfer most of the pictures to Spicer
cardboard mounts and keep the very best ones in the aluminum mounts, 
to put in glass.

Overall, I am pleased with the results, despite the overlap problem.  
I got quite a few good pictures with both Realists, and some nice 
hyperstereos of Athens from Acropolis with a single camera and a 24mm 
lens.

The problem with the Ilex developed during the third roll and it got 
worse with time.  I noticed that there was no overlap after a period 
of rest (when the camera is not used for some time) for the first 
shots and then it comes back when the camera is under constant use.  
The Realist 7p pictures are fine except for a few frames at the end
of one roll when the shutter got stuck open.  Fortunately, this camera 
has the lens' cap so the pictures were NOT ruined during rewinding.  I 
still have 5 K25 rolls to get back, all shot with the 7p Realist.

There are only a dozen pictures, damaged by the overlap problem, 
that I really wish they had survived.  There are some sequences that 
were totally ruined.  In one of them I was taking pictures of my 
little niece and I knew that they would be great because of the 
combination of location, lighting, etc., I even told her mom that 
I was shooting award-winning pictures at the time.  The pictures
would have been great indeed but were all damaged by the overlap.

>From other sequences, a couple of pictures made it and that was 
usually enough.  This year on purpose I was shooting multiple pictures 
for every subject/scene having possible resale/auctioning (in NSA 
as we discussed earlier).  This was very fortunate and the 
intermittent nature of the overlap problem still left me with one or 
two good pictures.  For example, I took quite a few pictures from
inside the Church on Sunday morning.  Most were ruined but a couple 
made it.  I was surprised that with wide open aperture (f3.5) and 
1/25s handheld, I got very good results from the Ilex Realist.

In some cases in order to save good pictures I was forced to do some 
creative mounting in portrait format.  That's because many pictures 
were reduced to 4 or ever 3 sprockets wide.  One example is a sunset 
by the sea shore that I was photographing with the 7p Realist on a 
tripod (I have not seen those pictures yet because they were shot in 
K25) I used the Ilex Realist to photograph the sunset scene with
the Realist on the tripod in the foreground illuminated by a bit of 
fill-in flash.  One picture from this sequence survived but only at 4 
sprockets.  I plan to mount it by overlapping two aluminum mounts 
since I do not have any ultra close-up Realist mounts and all 4 
sprocket mounts today are of reduced height.  Under normal
circumstances I would have never thought to reduce this picture to 
portrait format but now that I was forced to do it, I see that it 
works very well for this particular image.

There was some discussion on how to avoid this situation.  As I've 
said in the past, I am an amateur photographer and I take stereo 
pictures for the fun of it.  I refuse to let little things worry 
me.  I let my film be x-rayed all the way from Cleveland to
Chicago to Copenhagen to Athens and back (I was even "lucky" to
be picked for extra x-raying at the Customs in Chicago coming
back) because I have not read a single report of potential harm
of the film by airport x-rays.  I have many pictures with strangers 
and yet no model release forms because I take pictures for my own 
enjoyment.  I did not carry a back-up camera in this trip. I carried 
two different cameras, one 5p and one 7p, loaded usually with 
different films (I used primarily Velvia and K25 in the 7p Realist).  
In the past, before I had the 7p option, I only carried one Realist 
(and never had any problems).  If something bad is going to happen, 
let it happen.  It is not the end of the world.  Besides, this was not 
a "one in a life-time" trip for me as I go to Greece every other year.

Regards -- George Themelis


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