Blue and Grey, Red and Blue
So I’m reading this new (to me) blog, Lancaster at War, where Vince has taken a 19th century stereo pair and converted them into one image that can be viewed with those red/blue glasses you can get more-or-less anywhere. At his suggestion, I tried it out using these instructions and this Civil War stereoview. This is the result; it seems to work best if you lean back from the screen a bit.
Then there’s Captain Semmes of infamous Confederate raider Alabama. More background to this image here.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
Have you seen the book “Lincoln in 3-D” or seen the 3-d images that the Civil War Trust and Center for Civil War Photography displayed? Both are pretty cool. You can get a free pair of 3-D glasses from the Civil War Trust site (or at least could a few months ago) and they worked well.
Richard, thanks for commenting. The online exhibit from the CWT and Cetner for CW Phtography is here:
http://www.civilwarphotography.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=136:3-d-anaglyph-photographs-exhibit&catid=56&Itemid=115
Beautiful stuff.
I haven’t seen the Lincoln book, but I do have two of Zeller’s CW in Depth books, that use the traditional parallel-viewing technique. It’s an under-appreciated technology, that most people don’t think about once they put aside their childhood ViewMasters.
What am I saying? What kids today even know what a ViewMaster is?
I know what a viewmaster is. I’m struggling to figure out WTF an “app” is and why my phone is so stupid. And now you expect me to come up with some oldie-sorta-new-fangled glasses! Ok – I’ll admit I was momentarily grateful for, that explanation actually. At first click I thought I was having a stroke.
I am roadkill on the information highway. Go ahead and pick my bones.
“At first click I thought I was having a stroke.”
Best. Comment. Ever.
As I recall, Shelby Foote felt himself quite put-upon to be expected to use the telephone.
He might have felt differently if there was a Robert E. Lee app.
Foote was more a Nathan Bedford Forrest kinda guy.
A follow-up link, where I see the CWPT offers a free pair of red-cyan glasses and a whole bunch more photos to view:
http://www.civilwar.org/photos/3d-photography-special/
Eeeexcellent!
Just got my pair today. Your photos look great, and must lose almost no three-dimensionality in the transformation. The image on my blog, though, that you linked above is nowhere near as good as viewing with a stereoviewer, so I wonder if it wasn’t aligned properly:
Vince, some stereo cards published in the 19th century were rip-offs — single images, as opposed to true stereo images shot with paired lenses. The other thing one sees sometimes is that the people pasting the prints on the cards got them mixed up, switching left-for-right. In either case, the stereo effect is destroyed in the original.
Interesting, did not know that. But this image does has verifiably good three-dimensionality (aka depth?), as it looks great when I view the original card in the stereoviewer that I own, so that’s why I think something didn’t work quite right in my manipulations.