I an sometimes frustrated yet often oddly comforted by how little changes in my grandparents’ house. It’s beautiful, always. Every single object in the house is beautiful, and most of the objects are antique. It is a bit like a museum, and it’s a museum full of things I love to see.

But sometimes, there IS something new! I was completely delighted to see the wonderful new arrangements there. First of all, the basement (which was a bit scary) is now completely friendly. The stairs are wider and safer to descend, and the spaces have been walled in to be warmer, and the clutter has been neatly sorted and stored in cabinets and drawers with labels. Paul and I helped assemble the final cabinet. (Well, and that was a bit hilarious too… but you’ll have to ask me in person why.)

And, my grandmother has a new toy! She’s never been a fan of computers, and for a long time refused to have one in the house at all. But she’s settled in with a fancy new laptop, which is not going to be considered a “computer” but rather a digital photo album. A dear friend of hers is helping her get the hang of navigating the windows so that she can show slideshows from trips and holidays.

While showing us some of these slide shows, she remembered another picture she wanted to show us… but it wasn’t on the computer. It was in a set of photos from a day when everyone was working on the Dune House at Cape Cod… “David, where is that picture?” she asked my gradfather.
“Oh, we didn’t have the digital camera then. That was when we had the 3-D camera.”

3-D camera??

Off he goes to find the 3-D camera and the slide viewer that goes with it. Sure enough, back in the ’60s Kodak made a camera that took two photos at once, and, printed as slides and viewed through a little light-box, they created 3-D images.

It was amazing. We sat by the 1760’s fireplace with little fluffs of snow blowing down, and looked into a vintage-heavy black plastic box to see a past life light up in three dimensions. My Uncle John working on the Dune House. My mother and my aunt all dressed up at someone’s wedding. A balcony over a river. The levels of perspective, as with all 3-D technology, were a little too separate; a little too sharp. And the slides are in a tiny little box. But lit up, their artificial dimensions filled the space completely, and I couldn’t stop looking. I was completely enchanted.

You can get these cameras (and viewers) on eBay, for a couple of hundred dollers apiece, and I think I know a photoshop that would process the film as paired slides if the whole business was carefully explained. But in my internet search to learn that, I also ran across a suggestion for creating low-tech, “do-it-yourself” 3-D photos…
1. Stand with your feet apart. Shift your weight over your left foot, and take a picture.
2. Keeping the camera level and the subject still, shift over your right foot and take another picture.
3. Print both pictures out next to each other.
4. Hold the print out at arms length… and cross your eyes.

Ok, that’s actually a little too low-tech. I want to be able to do this without having to cross my eyes.

Suddenly occurred to me that I own a stereoscope . I got it at a yardsale somewhere. The pictures that came with it are images of old cotton mills, girls riding donkeys, antique city streets. But there’s no reason in the world I couldn’t take “shifted” photos of my own world and print them out on little cards to view in 3-D through the stereoscope.

The cats won’t hold still long enough – I’ll have to try while they’re sleeping – but Emily and Angie posed for me and we’ll see if it works…