[photo-3d] Re: My very first stereo picture

[wes@xxxxxxx]

--- In photo-3d@xxxx, Ron Beck <rbeck@xxxx> wrote:
> My very first stereo pictures were taken with a Konica FT1 and a
> Rolleiflex 35M, both 35mm cameras with 50mm lenses and slide film.  
The
> photos were shot at the hot air balloon festival, rushed to the 
only 1
> hour slide lab in the area and viewed in a 2x2x2 viewer four hours
> later.
> 
> Out of 24 slide pairs, I got 6-8 good fusable no tilt pairs that I 
still
> look at today.
> 
> Ron

This is great-- hearing of all these first-time efforts doing stereo, 
and the excitement that had to come from seeing first-time results.  
For me, it was 1957, as an eleven-year old child, caught up in the 3-
D movie craze of the previous few years, and fascinated by the 3-D 
comics of the time, I used my new Brownie Holiday (127 rollfilm) 
camera, and even had some expensive color film!  I just took a rather 
unremarkable shot in the back yard, carefully showing a fence post in 
the foreground, and distant houses across a little canyon in the 
background.  It was rather hyper, because my stereo base was about a 
foot (cha cha cha).  But, when I saw the results I was thrilled 
because it worked.  I had remembered the stereoscope cards at a round 
table in the back of my elementary school classroom and thought that 
maybe I could do it, too.  About a year later, on a vacation with my 
parents to Bryce Canyon, Utah, I shot several more pairs, but in 
black and white.  To complete the project, I built a flimsy viewer 
out of Tinker Toy-sized dowlings to support the glass objective 
lenses out of some toy binoculars at one end, and a holder for 
rectangular cards on which I had carefully pasted the cropped print 
pairs at the other end.  Not having any standards to work with I just 
made all the cards about 6-inches long, and about 4 1/2 inches high.  
With a pencil, I scrawled a little info below the pictures on each 
card.   I do remember that even at that age, I was freeviewing the 
prints to mount them.  (That's what comes of freeviewing the acoustic 
tiles on the ceiling in the classroom!)  The viewer is long-since 
broken apart and gone, but to this day I still have those early 
efforts at stereo print cards.

Wes