Hello, fine three-dimensional folks! Thanks for taking the time to visit this brand-new venture. Everything will hopefully start to make sense soon, but let’s get the formalities out of the way first…
Hi! My name is Sam R.M. Geden and I’m a writer, filmmaker and all-around artist based in the United Kingdom. My work is often framed by my experiences of having autism as well as all the things artists tend to deal with like depression and anxiety. All good fun, really! This is the first blog I’ve ever written – I’m one of those terminal Twitter addicts – but I wanted a space where I could properly organise my thoughts and processes around this lovely art-form I work in called stereoscopy.
“What the hell is stereoscopy and why does it sound so weird?”
It’s a very silly, outdated word for what we nowadays call 3D photography. The reason it’s called that and not, say, stereography is that it actually came before the mainstream introduction of photography by a number of years. Stereoscopy as a concept was discovered by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1832 and unveiled publicly in 1838; largely imagined to be used for optical illusions or testing the strength of your eyes. When photography was introduced to the UK in 1839 by William Henry Fox Talbot, it wasn’t long before the two formats got together and made one of the greatest media love-childs of all time: stereoscopic photography!
And this is what they look like! These two pictures might appear the same, but if you look at them carefully, you’ll notice they’ve got a few little differences. That’s because the two pictures were taken with a little bit of distance between them. They basically represent your eyes: your left eye sees one view of the world and your right eye, because it’s further right than your other eye, sees a slightly different view. Your brain puts these two pictures together to create a sense of depth.
I could go on for quite a while about the history of stereoscopy, but the only thing you need to know at this point is that it became very popular across the world in the Victorian era, crossing class divides so that they were enjoyed by factory workers and aristocrats alike. Then, as these things tend to happen, they faded into obscurity when the next big media phenomenon hit, but it never really died. Nowadays we can see stereoscopy through View-Master toys, virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift, the Nintendo 3DS and, of course, 3D cinema. 3D is the little medium that could, surviving by latching onto others to keep its intrigue alive.
“Right, so how does this work? Do you need 3D glasses like with films?”
Not quite. You need what is called a stereoscope or 3D viewer. You slot in the stereo (that’s what we call 3D pictures) in the back of the viewer and then look through the glasses-like side at it, and suddenly it becomes 3D in front of your eyes! It’s quite an experience seeing it for the first time. Plus, now they’re quite cheap to get a hold of. A post coming pretty soon will talk about how to get into stereoscopy and what you need. But for now, just know if you want to look at or create your own stereos, it’s never been cheaper and easier!
“So why are you doing this?”
2023 marks ten years since I got started in stereoscopy, producing stereos on a range of different subjects and styles. That’s quite a big part of my life and I like to think, in that pretentious artist-y way, that I’ve found something in those years that is worth sharing on a technical and emotional level. The purpose of this blog is to put into words my processes, experiences and ideas about making stereos to share the joy of 3D art and pass on my tricks to others who might be interested in trying it out. There are also a lot of stories around the stereos I’ve made that haven’t been spoken about before and it’d be nice to get those experiences down.
“OK, but what’s stereodyssey?”
Ah, that’s an even sillier word that I made up. Stereodyssey is, in a way, my mission statement for this blog as well as my art in general. Marshall McLuhan, a brilliant media philosopher, once said that “the medium is the message.” What that means is the format that you present an idea is just as important as the idea itself. Think about how films and books can tell the same story, but they will have a different impact on you because how they tell that story, i.e. visually or in writing, will be so wildly different.
Stereodyssey is my way of putting into a word what I believe the message of this medium is. For me, it’s about immersion into a different world and seeing beyond what you expect from it. 3D photos really come to life in front of you and it rewards looking at them for a long time. Because of the sense of depth, you’ll notice things about a scene or a view that you wouldn’t have caught if it was in 2D. I guess, the name ‘stereodyssey’ is about the journey you take into the 3D world and what you might discover there about the scene, about the artist, and maybe about yourself.
You could argue that a lot of subjects in stereoscopy are still powerful as 2D pictures and that 3D is a needless gimmick. I argue that the medium is the message and seeing it in 3D allows you to experience these scenes instead of just seeing them. It’s a medium of empathy and exploration: you feel as if you’re walking into someone’s memories or imagination as they experienced it. There’s an amazing sense of intimacy and immediacy that only 3D provides. It changes how you see and engage with the world, especially when you start creating in it.
The tagline of this blog probably best describes what drives me in stereoscopy: I’m in search of depth, trying to find what lies beneath a scene or a situation by showing it in 3D. Maybe I’m also in search of depth in myself by showing others how I see the world as someone with autism. But isn’t that the story of all artists? My work often adds a bit of weirdness into the ordinary world, and covers portraiture, landscapes and pure fantasy views, as you can see below.
Posts will, hopefully, come out every week and cover different topics. Some posts will talk you though the process of making a stereo from shooting the image to processing it, covering the problems I come up against and the solutions I find for them, as well as why I made certain choices throughout the process. Some will be about stereoscopy itself, like what makes for interesting subjects or spotlights on the techniques I use. Others will just be stories about the views and why it was important for me to capture them in 3D.
I want this to be both interesting for art-lovers, accessible for newcomers and enjoyable for anyone who just wants to hear a guy ramble about something he loves. If any of that ticks your boxes, please do stick around: I have a lot to share and I would love feedback from stereo-lovers as well as people who have never seen a 3D picture in their life!
Onwards – in search of depth!
SRMG
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