"American Pattern" stereograms

[barnacle]

For those with an interest in such things (after all, it comes around every thirty years or so and has done since the start of photography) might I point you at a collection I scanned some years ago? I inherited these from a godfather nearly thirty years ago, and have no idea of their provenance - other than that most or all are from American vendors dating between 1870 and 1910 or so.

If you have the knack, you can see the stereo image if you let your eyes cross slightly *if* the images are shrunk to fit on centres no wider than your eye spacing - about 60mm works for most. Easiest way is to shrink the window, or view it on a mobile phone... Or print the images at 600dpi is you happen to have an original viewer.

http://stereo.nailed-barnacle.co.uk/#!album-0-69

Some of these are very faded but it's surprising how much information is retained as stereo image.

Neil

[Peter Gomena]

Thanks for sharing these, Neil! I love stereograms.

[Bill_1856]

Wonderful! And much better 3-D effect than usually seen in this era. I wonder if there was a little "hyper-stereo" spacing of the lenses?

[goamules]

Those are iconic places and people. I loved the loading dock in New Orleans, among others. Thanks for showing us.

[barnacle]

I'm pretty certain that there was a wider than natural separation between the lenses when the images were taken (though the moon, taken at moonrise and moonset has an effective separation of the width of the earth...) hence the hyper-stereo.

If you mooch around that site a bit, you'll find other stereo stuff of various vintages, though you will need cyan-red anaglyptic spectacles to see some of them.

Neil

[Mark MacKenzie]

I really enjoyed these. Thank you.

[David Schaller]

Thanks for posting these. I grew up in Littleton, NH so I was particularly interested in the Littleton View Co images. I also have a number of stereograms of my family, and I'm wondering about your technique for scanning them,which was so successful. Any advice?
Thanks again,
Dave

[barnacle]

It was nothing special, David. I don't recall the details but my usual technique would have been to scan either at the finished size - 600dpi - or at twice that, with a resize to 600dpi after any gain/contrast/gamma modification.

Some of the images were *very* thin and I may have used 16-bit scans to avoid quantising noise when boosting the contrast.

It was as far as I recall the same Epson 2450 Photo flatbed that I still use.

Neil

[David Schaller]

Thanks Neil. I'll have to try some. The ones I have are very curved, which works in the stereoscope, but I thought would be hopeless on a flatbed scanner. When I get some time, I'll try.
Thanks again.
Dave

[barnacle]

Mine too are curved, maybe half an inch high at the centres, but I think the DOF on the scanner was enough to cope with it.

Neil

[David Schaller]

Thanks Neil, I'll have to try to dig mine out and experiment.