A Special Exposition of the Paris Pages:
Paris in Stereo - Introduction 
A collection of thirteen stereo pairs of Paris.
By Norman Barth - La Jolla, California; Paris, France - nbarth@paris.org
My first experience viewing a stereo pair was as a child - kindergarten or
first grade. At some point my parents gave me a "View Master" - either for
a birthday, or Christmas. The way the images sort of "popped out" was
simply magical. No one told me that what I was seeing was a "stereo pair" -
two images taken from slightly different positions to mimic the seperation
of the eyes. Thus when viewed one image per eye, the brain "fuses" them
to create a 3D image. That was the magic that I saw in my View Master.
At first examination, you may think these pairs of images are simple
duplications - they are not. Look more closely, and you will see slight
differences. These differences due to physically moving the camera a
slight distance to the left or right before taking the second image.
The different perspective is just what our brains need to recreate the
3D effect.
Through the years I've "bumped" into stereo pairs here and there.
Sometimes photo stores put
antique wooden viewers in their display windows for example.
When I studied cartography, we used
stereo pairs to make maps - although that is
probably a fading art as satellites and computers are better.
Recently there has been the "Stereogram" explosion. Probably you
can find a book of them in any bookstore, and even more likely you
have gotten a headache trying to see the secret image encoded in
the seemingly random pattern of dots and swirls. Stereo paris
are different however. And holograms are altogether different
again!
There are different ideas about best way to initiate the uninitiated in "free viewing" stereo
pairs. My short description of the technique is simply: "blur the two images by relaxing
your eyes' focus; a third image will appear inbetween the two images; this is the
beginning of the "fused" image. By concentrating (or relaxing) you can now completely create
the fused image and see the 3D effect.
The arrangement of the images here is for cross-eyed viewing - pretty self-explainatory
no?
You might prefer to read a more
scientific description however.
I've also left the images un-interlaced so that the gif image quality is a high as possible given that I've
also reduced most of them to 5 or 6 bit color.
The "art" of the stereo pair is quite old. I am no historian, but when
photography came into existence late in the last century, people fairly
quickly hit upon the idea of stereo pairs. The antique wooden viewers
are testimony to that, as well as the images themselves.
My last encounter was in December 1994 in Berkeley, California where
I was attending a conference. A friend of mine was the systems
administrator for a bunch of opthomologists who were using stereo
images in their research (and still are of course). Suddenly I realized
that I should create some stereo pairs of Paris landmarks.
After a few rolls of film experimenting, I was ready to go for the
"real thing". I don't have a stereo camera, and simply use my
trusty SLR (Pentax Spotmatic if anyone can remember those).
Being unable to take simultaneous images means that "action" shots
with people and cars moving around are not possible.
This isn't really very satisfactory, but it is enough to start
with. Here are some of the results.
Page: 1 - 2 - 3 of Paris in Stereo
