Yucatan 3-D, sending a kid

[P3D Gavin Stokes <gstokes@xxxxxxx>]

Vincent,

I would recommend the trip.  I spent the summer in Merida studying two
summers ago, and I toted my Kodak stereo and my Canon EOS 620 all over the
place.  A lot of what I took with the Canon was redundant, since all I would
ever show now is the 3-D stuff (I used slide film in both).

If you can, take a bus to Chiapas and visit San Cristobal.  Ride horses in
the mountains, where you'll find lush grass, a lively river, and Maya women
doing laundry in the water and setting it out on the banks to dry.  It's so
cool after the heat of the Yucatan, too.

The only unfortunate incident occurred on the way home from Chiapas, when a
thief rode the bus from San Cristobal to our first rest stop.  At the stop,
the bus was locked up.  But since the thief was already on it, he ransacked
my backback and that of the friend sitting next to me.  Gone was the 620 and
its $350 24mm lens.  But my Kodak was in the overhead bin, and my stereo
Walkman recorder was under a poncho on the seat.  Both remained undiscovered.

My fellow students and my professor (from the U of Florida) were all
fascinated by the concept of 3-D pictures.  A key move was bringing a cheap
steal-the-light viewer and some decent but dispensable slides for
demonstration.  Of course I was not about to trust my slide film to any
Mexican processor.

When I got back to Chicago, I promptly bought a TDC projector with 4-inch
lenses.  I was dismayed to find severe ghosting when I projected on a silver
lenticular screen.  I think I posted a message on this list about it,
entitled "Projection stinks" or something of the sort.  But that screen was
older than I am (28).  So I loaded up the cast-iron TDC, 8 boxes of slides,
and 10 pairs of polarized glasses that I had collected from the Epcot Center
during two family vacations (Oops. I guess I was supposed to drop those into
the bin by the exit.).  Don't say that being a pack-rat doesn't pay off.  I
collected half those glasses when I was a little kid, thinking that someday
I'd want them.  Sure enough, several years later someone gives my mom a
Kodak stereo, and I'm one of the few high-school students shooting 3-D
pictures.  Anyway, I hauled all this crap onto a plane for Florida to give a
slide show.  On the way to the Gainesville campus I stopped at a camera shop
and bought a new Da-Lite screen.  Can you imagine their amazement when I
pulled a 30-year-old TDC projector out of my backpack and set it up in the
store to test out the screen?  The other customers were fascinated when I
handed them glasses and let them look at the great pyramid of Chichen Itza
in 3-D!

I arrived on campus and my fellow travelers and my professor came over to
see the slides.  They loved them.  Slides alone would have been entertaining
enough, when you have people brought together by an intense experience like
living in a foreign country.  But the added dimension (literally) made it
even better.  You could almost smell the smells and feel the heat we walked
around in every day.

Some of the best Yucatan shots were inside restaurants or homes or caves,
where you could see out through a window or a hole.  There's a cenote (water
hole) you should visit at Dzitsnup (I have to check that spelling) where
sunlight comes through a hole in the ceiling and illuminates an underground
lake.  It only comes in at mid-day, and I MISSED IT!  But it would have made
a great 3-D shot.

Regards,
Gavin


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