Eli | Mike | Mary - click for individual bio

October 14, 2003

Well.

In the wake of last week’s gubernatorial election, I would merely like to make one teeny, tiny little observation before I move on to other topics:

‘Nuff said.

Boring obsessions, part two:

When I was in my second year of graduate school I decided that I wanted to take a photography course. I had a camera, an old 35mm SLR job, and I thought I should learn how to use it. There was a problem when I went to register, though: all the available spots were already taken by actual photography majors, and the photo classes were completely full. All except one, that is. All except for THREE-DIMENSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY.

Yes, 3-D! Like those red and green drawings of Gumby that look like they’re coming out at you when you put on the little glasses. Like Viewmaster reels. Like Captain Eo. Did you know that you, dear reader, can make your own 3-D photographs? Neither did I, until I gamely signed up for the class. And what a class it was!

Our teacher was a wonderful if slightly manic person who owned not just a special camera for taking 3-D pictures but a projector for watching 3-D slideshows! As I recall, the first lecture consisted of watching 3-D slides of a party he had recently attended. “This is a 3-D picture of a cake,” our teacher would announce. “Oh, look, see this picture of this woman? She’s giving us the finger. In Threeeeee Deeeeeeee!”

I should try to explain the principle on which this noble art form functions, but it involves binocular vision and is so boring that I won’t try. Unless you feel inclined to do a little research yourself, for our purposes you may safely assume that 3-D works by the will of magic pixies.

I soon learned how to take my own 3-D pictures. I wanted to take 3-D pictures of everything! The inside of my apartment. My relatives. My feet. Then I realized that there are only certain subjects that really benefit from the 3-D effect. These are subjects that involve a lot of contrasts in depth, which are pretty much limited to: (1) views down the center of a street lined with receding rows of trees or telephone poles, and (2) people standing in front of ravines. There are actually some pretty cool things you can do if you put the camera in a dark room, leave the shutter open, and flash lights all around--our teacher called this “light sculpture”--but even so, I found that my eyes got fatigued from looking at slide after slide, so much so that after a while I stopped being able to see the 3-D effect. And so, after a few months of rabidly militant 3-D-only photography, I began to dribble back towards taking regular “mono” pictures, and in a fit of insolvency I decided to sell my trusty David White Stereo Realist camera. Alas.

So that obsession was pretty brief on my part. There are many folks, though, who have not tired of the 3-D experience: my teacher, for one! There is a rather interesting story about him concerning an incident in Paris, which I will always regret not witnessing in person: apparently he had never been out of the country before, yet was selected to chaperone a group of undergraduates on a trip to Europe. They wound up in the Louvre, where my teacher tried to get every French person blocking his view of the Mona Lisa to move so he could take a 3-D picture. Unfortunately he did not speak any French, so he started yelling, “get out of the way, everyone! Movez! Movez! Why don’t you French people MOVE?” I gather that the French did not respond favorably to this. I should point out that the Mona Lisa is a painting, and entirely flat, and therefore perhaps not a prime subject for three-dimensional photography.

Anyway, the best thing about the 3-D class was definitely our final group project, for which we put together a 3-D shadow puppet play that we performed for a live audience (all wearing little green-and-red glasses). The play was a series of linked vignettes based loosely around the theme of Natural Disasters. I don’t remember too much about it except that somewhere along the line we decided that one of the natural disasters should be a giant, pus-filled zit on the back of someone’s ass. This was represented, of course, by a large balloon that was filled with confetti, which popped while our teacher gamely screamed “ohhh! Oooohhhhh! Help meeee! I have a giant, pus-filled zit on my ass! OOOOOooohhhhhhhhhh!” in a sort of piercing, foppish falsetto. Every so often I run into someone who witnessed this show and they always solemnly declare that it was the most amazing thing they ever saw while at school. I’ll admit that it was pretty boss. I want to do it again some day.

Eli