A sight worth seeing, a vision of you

[austin_dern]

[ Posting early; if nothing else, Verizon DSL has decided to provide no more than 65 seconds of Internet in any fifteen-minute window. ]

I forgot a couple stray bits from the week with bunny_hugger, if you can imagine. Two of them are connected.

One actually goes back to Thanksgiving Day, when bunny_hugger's father made another attempt at taking three-dimensional photographs of us. One of these attempts ended with the explosion of his flash bulb and the general unsettling of bunny_hugger's rabbit. And this was (somehow) the first time I'd visited there since Thanksgiving and so the first chance to look at the photographs.

Viewing 3-D photographs this way is done by putting the two photographs in a frame that you can slide in and out to get to the right focal length. For some pictures everything comes together and it really is a three-dimensional effect. More often, I have to admit, it comes out looking the a photograph of cardboard cutouts of people standing beside cardboard cutouts of furniture or plants or the wall or the like.

Well, the exploding-flash-bulb photo didn't produce a three-dimensional picture, at least not exactly. It isn't quite the cardboard-cutouts picture either. There were elements that looked somewhat three-dimensional, but the weird lighting, partly over-exposed, partly underlit, was too weird to classify as anything particular.

Where this gets really funny is the next day at Greenfield Village we walked through the (possibly real) boardinghouse for bachelors employed by Thomas Edison, and some of their recreations were strewn on the tables there. One of them was the frame for looking at stereoscopic photographs. It looked uncannily like bunny_hugger's father's, down to the wood construction. (Of course, there's a pretty strong functional drive toward a particular general design.) bunny_hugger and I tried not to crack up, but we did come to explain ourselves to that building's guide.

Trivia: About 100 billion tons of cellulose is biosynthesized (and decomposed) annually. Source: Napoleon's Buttons: 17 Molecules That Changed History, Penny Le Couteur, Jay Burreson.

Currently Reading: Taxi!: A Social History Of The New York City Cabdriver, Graham Russell Gao Hodges. He includes his old (1975) taxi driver's license on the back cover, making it the more appealing a book.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Dad takes those using a vintage film camera with two lenses. They're called stereoscopes.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

And they are, to me, neat stuff. I have thought about getting stereoscopic digital cameras, unless that should be camera, but probably won't until I have the time to go photographing often again. And the simplicity of the film-camera viewing frame is hard to beat.