Stereoscopic Technique: History of Photography Essay

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History Of Photography

Regardless of how beautiful photographs appear, they have one limitation. They always project a two-dimensional view (2D), as opposed to three-dimensional (3D) view of phenomena. In essence, therefore, stereoscopic photography has got to do with the presentation of two photographs of the same item so as to create a perception of depth (3D). The said photographs are presented from positions that slightly differ. It should be noted that stereo-photography, as some authors have in the past pointed out, is almost as old as photography itself. This text concerns itself with the stereoscopic technique. In so doing, it not only focuses on the introduction of the said techniques, but also defines how the technique correlates with the psychedelic movement.

Discussion

The stereoscope, its discovery as well as development, is closely associated with Sir David Brewster and Charles Wheatstone (Crary 104). These two figures had, as Crary points out, during this period done significant research on optical illusions and other visual phenomena such as afterimages (104). It should be noted that the stethoscopes' reality effect was significantly variable. This is particularly the case given that there are some kind of stethoscopes whose images have or leave little to no three dimensional effect.

It is important to note, from the onset, that stereoscopic photography essentially brings about the depth illusion via the utilization of the human vision's binocularity (Janson and Janson 94). According to Crary the binocularity of human vision was one of the issues that troubled those studying photography in the nineteenth century (104). In the words of the author, "binocular disparity, the self-evident fact that each eye sees a slightly different image, had been a familiar phenomenon since antiquity" (Crary 119). Most particularly, the issue that troubled researchers at the time was: how exactly could an observer experience an object as a unitary or single unit, whereas the said observer "perceives with each eye a different image?" (Crary 119). It should be noted that two explanations purporting to explain this anomaly had been offered previously.

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While one of the proposals, according to Crary "proposed that we never saw anything except with one eye at a time; the other was a projection theory articulated by Kepler, and proposed as late as 1950s" (119). The said projection theory proposed that each of the two human eyes projected the item being viewed to its actual location.

Stereographs present or capture two photographs that are largely similar, with each of the two photographs being presented for each of the two eyes (Janson and Janson 96). It is by 'seeing' the two images, presented side by side, that the human brain brings together the said images, effectively occasioning the spatial depth illusion. Between the years 1850 and 1930, there were numerous stereoscopic views produced by photographers from across the world.

It was Euclid who, in 280 A.D., discovered that the perception of depth is obtained once each of the two eyes receives, in a simultaneous manner, images that are dissimilar but belong to the same object (Janson and Janson 112). In essence, the popularity of three dimensional photography was further extended by Queen Victoria in 1851 after she paid a visit to the….....

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