Slidebar Stereo Photography

These stereo pairs were taken with a Lubitel 166 Universal TLR camera. It's not the best medium format camera, but it's one of the cheapest. The exposures were taken separately, and a macro focusing rail was used to shift the camera from left to right between exposures. The camera was moved approximately 6 inches (about 240% of normal eye separation) between exposures. These images were made by scanning a contact sheet, cropping the images with xv and pasting them together with pbmplus. No special effort was made to correct for horizontal, vertical, or rotational errors. The rotationals errors should be minimal since the images were made from a scan of a single strip of film.

North from 34th Street

This image is looking northeast from the 20th floor of the Empire State Building. I'm pretty fascinated by all the structures on the various rooftops.

[IMAGE]

This image is an attempt to duplicate a stereo pinhole I made with my Santa Barbara pinhole camera and the macro focusing rail.

Twinbar Stereo Photography

These stereo pairs were taken with simultaneous exposures by a pair of Lubitels on a flash bracket. The stereo base was about 3 inches. The infinity separation on the stereo cards is 70mm, to match the lens separation on my cardboard fold up stereo viewer. In the future I'll mount my stereo slides (unfortunately I can't show these since I don't have access to a transparency scanner) to match the King Inn format, and enlarge the prints to match a Holmes stereoscope.

These smaller images were made by scanning mounted stereo cards made by cutting up a set of contact sheets. Scanning the individual contact sheets proved to be too much trouble since the lab I had the development and contacts done at did not make any effort to keep the edge of the negatives aligned with the edge of the paper, thus making it difficult to control rotational errors added by the scanning process.

Panix Birthday Picnic

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This stereo pair was taken at the recent Panix Birthday Picnic. The lighting conditions were bad, and the negatives are actually terribly overexposed. How many panix.users can you identify?

Art in the Park

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It seems that on the same day that Panix was holding it's birthday picnic an art class was out for a field trip in Central Park.

City Hall Park

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This is a view of the fountain in City Hall Park. That's the Municipal Building in the background on the right.

Future Work

There seems to be some difference in exposure between the Lubitels that I haven't had a chance to work out. I'll have to take the time to do some testing and work out a correction factor. I intend to continue to use 120 format film for stereo slides, but I'll probably switch to a larger format for stereo prints so that the contact prints will more closely match the stereocard format for a Holmes viewer.

By the way, for those who have trouble viewing these images, I find that various web browsers do a terrible job of displaying greyscale images. I highly recommend using some other program to view them. I use xv.

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Brian Reynolds <reynolds@panix.com>

Last modified: Fri Oct 26 23:29:11 2012