The photograph here is one of the late Judy Garland dancing the jitterbug in the mid-1940's. Probably, the only thing unusual about the photograph is the strange colouring. This strange colouring was created when an ordinary black-and-white photograph was colourized in order to be seen in 3D when viewed through ChromaDepth glasses.The ChromaDepth process creates a pair of glasses that optically causes red objects to appear closest, blue objects to appear farthest away, green objects to appear at a middle distance, and so on.
Now, what I was wondering was, has anyone else ever heard of this type of 3D process, or is it virtually unknown?
To see a larger version of the photo, simply click on the photo, and to find out more about the ChromaDepth process, simply click on the name "ChromaDepth".
There's quite a bit about it on the 'net - use "history of photography + chromadepth" and here's a wikipee
ReplyDeletelink: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy
My dad and my grandfather were both big photography/film buffs. I remember both of them explaining this to me when I was little. Thanks for bringing back such a nice memory for me. :)
ReplyDeleteI've seen the glasses and I vaguely remember it but I'm not enough of a buff to know anything about it. I'd follow the below instructions, Sorry.
ReplyDeleteI've seen it before, but never knew what it was called, or if I did I'd forgotten.
ReplyDeleteOk Jack. Im really going to reveal my age here. But I'm sure you'll remember as well.
ReplyDeleteDo you remember that little device, from many years ago. Big, brown glasses kind of thing. You held it up and looked into it. There would be slides in it. Often of Niagara Falls and such.
You looked into the glasses and pulled a level and the slide changed picture. What the heck was that called?
Eventually back in the 60's they made a cheaper children's version of it.
Ack! Darn I can't remember the name of it.
But I am sure this would have been the same kind of photography.
Karen: Thank you for mentioning Wikipedia. I had pretty well forgotten about that.
ReplyDeleteDeena: The big brown glasses were a Brewster stereoscope. It was used to view stiff cardboard cards with a pair of photographs on each of them. The photo on the left was viewed with the left eye, and the one on the right was viewed with the right eye.
In the 1950's, they made a smaller version of it known as a View Master. A disc 3 inches in diameter now replaced seven stereoview cards. View Masters were popular from the 1950's into the 1960's. They even made a View Master reel packet of the 1969 Apollo moon landing. But then the rights for making the View Master products got sold and resold. And the quality of View Master reels produced soon got worse and worse. And View Master was soon thought of as a "child's toy". There may be still some interesting views produced in Europe, though.
The ChromaDepth process was different from the other processes in that they used only a single image instead of a pair of images. The distance of an object from the viewer was indicated by it's colour. The process was only invented in 1998, so it may not have had time to take off yet. Perhaps the weird colour scheme needed to get the depth effect was also a bit of a drawback.
ReplyDeleteAh.Yes. Stereoscope, and Viewmaster.
ReplyDeleteThank you. That has been driving me crazy for two days.
Yes, your right. I'd forgot that. There was actually two photographs. One for each eye.
Not the same process at all.
I sat here for ages trying to remember those to words... Thanks Jack!! I knew "what" she was talking about, but couldn't remember the name.. Viewmaster.. I had one of those.
ReplyDeleteStereoscope - we used those in one of my Surficial Geology classes too.