Ian Ference's 3D blog on all things stereographic, from classic scopes & stereoviews to historical context & modern analysis
Douglas Adams hated Heathrow Airport. My wife likes it. Somewhere in between these points of view, there was the 1950s "London Airport", as captured here by VistaScreen. In this essay, we'll explore the nature of documentary stereography that was probably boring when shot but has become more interesting with the passage of time.
Doctor A. O. Fasser took this 3D photo of two men fixing up a tire on a Nieuport 10, most likely in the spring of 1916. Here we take a look at the sesquiplane, before taking a look at the importance of negatives - both in general, and relative to the Fasser Collection.
The Germans were late to bring tanks to the Great War; while the Allies built over 5,000, the Germans built a mere 20. This essay examines the history of those 20 A7V-class tanks, and takes a closer, stereoscopic look at two of them.
After attending an Iron Maiden concert last night, I was inspired to dig back into my archives and find this morality play in a single 3D genre image - in which a monk, having broken his fast, is visited by a demon and a spirit - which, coming back around, seems like it could very much be the subject of an Iron Maiden song!
A month-long French offensive known as the Second Battle of Verdun is the subject of this 10-slide series put out by the SDV division of LSU. Featuring scenes from the recaptured regions surrounding Esnes, the series really portrays the devastation caused by 4 million shells impacting a region localized around a few miles of space.
In this third and final part of a series on VistaScreen's stereoviews featuring the Bertram Mills Circus, we look at the inferior (but scarcer) "Night" version of Series 46, which replaced the "Day" version at some point in time. We also look at possible times these photos were taken, the performers who appear in them, and the problems with shooting on slow glass plates in the dark.
In the second installment (out of three) focused on the wonders of the three VistaScreen series on the Bertram Mills Circus, I document my personal journey over the course of the last couple of years to complete Series 46 - which led to my discovery of two more complete 10-card sets, and to a fascination with VistaScreen. We also delve into the reasons why there are two alternate sets with the same designation - including the theory that some rather racially unacceptable portrayals of American Indians caused the company to change from this relatively quaint "Day Series" to the more formal, and more scarce, "Night Series".
Out of love of all things circus, my very first series of images on this blog was VistaScreen C.62 "Bertram Mills Circus". This is more or less a redux of that series, revamped to greatly improve the image quality, display options, and anaglyphs, with some new information. This is the first in a series of three posts focused on 1950s VistaScreen stereography of Britain's answer to RB&BB - Bertram Mills Circus - because who doesn't love the Big Top?
An amateur set of contemporary modern ruins photography of Reims, at and around the bombed-then-burned-out Cathedral, and probably taken well before the end of the Great War, shows 12 views from a very talented photographer, documenting the damage to a beautiful city and its centerpiece.
Two glass plate negatives from the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris, taken from roughly the same position, give a window into the history of the Expo, as well as some of the underlying tensions that were coming to a boil in advance of the Second World War.