February 2008 - OSPS Club meeting

Tuesday February 5th we had our usual club meeting. It was an interesting meeting as usual. A couple of guests, including Marty, a beginner in stereo, just shot his first roll with a Stereo Realist, and another gentleman, who is doing a very interesting work, extracting stereo pairs from still video frames of a sunken submarine (I will have to write more about this later).

John Waldsmith talked about our May 3-4 Stereoscopic Weekend. Our President, John B., talked about the Hannah Montana 3D movie and give it mixed reviews.

Three people showed slides during the Open Projector: I went first with slides that I took at the Buckeye Trail, a couple of days after my 50K race (I talked about it in the meeting), close-ups with my Horseman camera, and the first slides from my Ochotta stereo attachment, plus a slide bar stereo pair (White House). Our kitty was my model in some of the Horseman camera, plus the 2 macro stereos that I showed. My impression from the viewer is that the Ochotta stereos look flat, but they project well. I was surprised that a member said that the Ochotta stereos looked more natural than the Horseman stereos, which he thought had too much stretch. I don’t completely agree. Close ups at the near focusing of the Horseman look fine. Maybe things look stretched when I use +1 and +2 close up filters.

Gary B. showed beautiful slides from Sicily. The sharpness and depth was fantastic and the mounting was perfect! Chuck W. followed, with more slides from Italy.

After the break, we moved on with the competition. The subject was “Motion”. My entries:

1. I had taken several slide bar stereos of some family athletic trophies. I entered one of two runners (my trophies from the Kent 10K races where I have placed in the top 5, from a field of 25 runners!) I labeled this one “Spirit of the Marathon”, from the movie I saw recently).
2. I remember I had a picture of Tony and the kids jumping in the water, from our 2005 vacation in Minnesota. It took me a while to find it. I called it “1, 2, 3, Jump!”.
3. For my third entry I had something else in mind, but when I could not find #2, I projected one of my fireworks from last year (with twin Pentax cameras, 4 ft apart, and 20mm lenses). I figured that they qualify as “Fire in Motion”.

In my opinion, I would rate the slides as follows: 1) 1, 2, 3, Jump!, 2) Spirit of the Marathon, 3) Fire in Motion. The judges have different opinions. they gave the “Fire in Motion” first place! The “Spirit of the Marathon” got 3rd place. The “jump” did not place! The reason I did not think the Fireworks would do well is that they had very little depth. But the composition was nice and the slide had good impact.

Chuck W. asked why I was not getting any ghosting with the Fireworks slide. The answer is that the slide has little depth and it is mounted close to the window. To get ghosting you must have a decent separation on screen, which means that the high contrast subject is far away or mounted sufficiently behind the screen. Mine was close to the screen.

There were several good slides and, overall, another enjoyable meeting!