Boy, what we stereophiles won’t go through for a 3-D thrill!

Fantasy was a big part of my childhood. Feeding that was the worlds created by comic books. Those comics that employed 3-D techniques held a particularly strong interest for me.

When I was 12, I looked through a hand-held Holmes stereoscopic viewer in an antique store and was smitten. I somehow talked my parents into buying it for me — an odd toy for a child.

The stereo viewer came with a bunch of cardboard-mounted stereo photos from around the world. It seemed to me an easy task to replicate the three dimensions but with scenes from around my home. To do so, I borrowed mom's Brownie Hawkeye and started my lifelong passion for photography.

To make stereos from the Brownie I used the following process. If my subject was human, I asked them to hold the same pose for a full minute while I:

1. Shoot
2. Move laterally about two inches
3. Look at the small red window, while winding the film to the next frame
4. Frame the shot as close to the first shot as possible
5. Squeeze off the second shot

Many stereo experiments and devices later, I find I occassionally employ the same technique for distant landscapes — only moving several feet apart for hyper-stereo.

Of all the stereo cameras and stereo attachments I've ever run accross, the best is the Prism Stereo by Tri-Delta. This device screws onto the lens of a 35mm camera and orients the images in a head-to-head fashion onto one slide frame. The slides are processed and cardboard-mounted as usual.

When the slide is looked at through the prism viewer, the image is almost twice as wide as high, a closer match to the way we see than the vertical formats from most other camera stereo attachments. Also, the slide (containing both right and left eye images) never gets cut and thereby never gets out of alignment. I never got the projection device, to my regret, and haven’t been able to find it since Tri-Delta went out of business.