Why didn’t I think of this before?? Oh yeah … I did …

So the other day, I blogged about taking an old Kodak Stereo camera, shooting some pictures of the Toll Gate Ice Cream parlor in Slingerlands, and turning the resulting photos into a three-dimensional cinemagraph.  You know… and got this picture for my efforts.

And after reading some of the blog comments about the project, I actually felt inspired to create a new project out of this.

Follow me here.

A couple of years ago, I took some photos of a wishing well at a New Brunswick beach, and turned them into one of those old-fashioned “stereo card” devices from a long time ago.  You know … the wooden things with the two little prisms, you put the card in a slot, you look through the wooden gizmo, and boom boom you see three dimensions.

Yeah.  I blogged about it.  Heck, I even tried to enter the stereo card in the New York State Fair photo competition.  It didn’t get accepted, and I put the project on the back burner.

But what if I could take those two Toll Gate Ice Cream photos … and maybe turn THEM into a stereo card?

Okay, I gotta find the software.  Stereo Photo Maker.  It’s somewhere on my hard drive … somewhere … ah, nertz, just download another copy, Chuck, it’s freeware…

Okay.

I then took the two images and aligned them in PhotoShop, so that a single focal point – the lower-case “m” in “cream” on the building – would be centered exactly between the two images.  From that point, the two images should blend nicely when viewed through a stereopticon or ye olde-tyme stereo viewer.

And once I did that … I entered both pictures into Stereo Photo Maker, and created one of ye olde-tyme stereo cards.  You can “free-view” the image on the monitor, by simply relaxing your eyes until the two images blend together.

Good.  It works.  Creativity, Miller … you got this.

Now for the aesthetics.  I need this to look kinda like ye olde-tyme stereo card, complete with vintage font and attribution.  Now granted, the last time I tried this was nearly three years ago, and I used two standard photos from my Nikon D700 to get the image I wanted.  This time, both images were captured simultaneously.  And even though this was a static image, I think that maybe I have a chance to make this totally work.

Align.  Font.  Create.

And …

Holy …

Yeah.  The pictures look weathered, just like a stereopticon photo of days gone by.  And even though the blue background and yellow font is a modern touch, it still accents the old photos very nicely.

Calculation and contemplation time.

Once my Kodak Stereo camera comes back from getting a cleaning at CameraWorks, I can use any film in that camera that I choose – whether it’s print film or slide film, since I can scan the film and manipulate the images digitally.

And I can also use my four-lensed Nimslo camera for this project if I choose – all I have to do is toss out the two middle images and create the stereo card from the extreme left and right images.

AND … if the image is static, I could still use my Nikon Df digital camera, all I need to do is set up some sort of a dolly tracking tripod and shoot the image as I move the camera from left to right.

Ooh.

Let me repeat that.

Ooh.

And let’s say … if I was to create a few of these images throughout the year … and create some stereo cards from it … and get my mitts on an old stereo card viewer …

I could have some serious fun with this.

Yeah.  Any time I go on a photo shoot or photo excursion, I could take along the Nimslo and/or the Kodak Stereo and get some pocket-aces shots while I shoot with my regular camera gear.

And maybe at the end of the year … depending on how these pictures turn out …

I’m thinking there’s an event that would be perfectly built for this project.

If you know what I mean …