P3D Depth required in stereo?

[Kenneth Luker <kluker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, you all have helped me decide.  I'm about to send along the
latest Alpha Folio box, and I hadn't decided what shot to include.
This discussion has given me the courage to send in a shot that I had
thought would never be seen by anyone but myself and those who came
to the house (and then, only if I thought they were particularly
congenial and accepting).  Of course, those in the Alpha circuit may
laugh me to derision. (Then again, they're too nice to do that!)

Some weeks ago during a bout of insomnia I was passing through my
living room at about three a.m.  The street was quiet and the house
was still.  Only a dim glow from the streetlamp seeped through the
curtains to lift the rooms out of obscurity.  As I rounded the
corner, I saw a shaft of light stabbing through the uncurtained
leaded window high above the bookcase and casting a golden
window-image on the face of a vertically-oriented oil painting on
the opposite wall.  The subject of the painting (a landscape painted
by my mother) was almost imperceptible in the stark lighting--the
bright projected window dominated in the room, falling partly on the
painted canvas, partly on the gold/green frame, partly on the
ivory-colored wallpaper.  On a whim, I went into the other room and
got my tripod-mounted realist from where it stands in the corner.  I
set it up about eight feet from the wall, took an exposure reading,
set the f-stop at a sharpness-assuring setting, and made the
exposure.  I  bracketed three shots at about one, two and three
minutes.  Then I forgot about it and went back to bed.

When the roll came back from the processor I remembered the incident
and mounted the shots.  There is, of course, almost no depth at all.
The total relief in the view is from the wall to the front of the
painting's frame--maybe two inches, at about eight feet from the
camera.  I mounted the picture behind the stereo window, so the
observer has a sense of being in a room, but that's it.  Did it
work? (What could one mean by "work" in this context?)  Well, one of
my favorite critics (my youngest married daughter) picked that shot
as the best in the roll.  I wouldn't have.  But she noticed the mood,
the binocularly-revealed sparkles on the surface of the oiled canvas,
the space between the wall and the stereo window, the unusual almost
monochromatic effect of the non-white light.  It may have worked as
well in mono, but I don't think so.

So, I'll include it in this round of the folio.  As far as I know,
Dr. T. is the only one of this group that will see it, so maybe when
he sees it we can hear whether it passes his muster.  Maybe it was a
wasted shot, but what else was I to do at three in the morning?

Ken Luker


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