I finally got my hands on an actual set of antique stereograph cards. This is a collection of 32 cards by the H. C. White Company, and includes scenes from Havana, Cuba, Manila in the Philippines, several other interesting locations. There are also some humorous staged scenes included in the lot. These are all polychrome color cards, and have the copyright date of 1905 on them. I found some of the subject matter fascinating. This shot of the beach at Atlantic City is a far cry from today’s image of Jersey Shore…
If you look closely at the individual in the foreground, you’ll see that it’s a man and not a woman. He’s just wearing a weird yellow hat. Two that I found particularly intriguing were the “An Affair of Honor” cards. The first shows two women dueling with rapiers. In this image, one woman drives her point home with “the Successful Thrust.”
In the next image, “Honor Satisfied”, we see the victorious woman standing over her slain opponent.
It’s all rather gory, and there is the added scandal of this being two women dueling. The rest of the images are much tamer. I scanned the cards and posted them to my Flickr account. Using Photoshop, I created cyan-red anaglyphs of each card and posted those, as well. Some of the 3D effects are more pronounced than others. One of the things I noticed was that there are some anomalies in printing that make creating anaglyphs not as easy as it might be. You can’t just line up one image on top of another. You really do have to look for an appropriate focal point, then go from there. The missing focal point is obvious when trying to view some of the images in 3D. Here’s one that I think turned out very well…
…and one that turned out not so well…
Even though the frames are lined up perfectly, the parallax is way off in the second image. As it turns out, I didn’t really have to scan all of these. The University of Louisville has all 43 of the images from this set, including the third in the “Affair of Honor” series.
They also have an extensive collection of other stereographs, all with excellent metadata and descriptions. The only drawback is that they aren’t in as high a resolution as the images I scanned.
These have been fun to look through, and between this and the collections at the Library of Congress, the Robert N. Dennis Collection at the New York, and this great collection with descriptions from Flickr photographer Okinawa Soba, I could easily spend all of my waking hours creating anaglyphs…
…but I won’t.
In case you are interested, here is a slide show of the photos I scanned, and the anaglyphs I created from them. It really will help if you’ve got a pair of cyan-red 3D glasses.