Stereo Southside Sweetie

Hughes' Chocolates is one of those "Only-in-Oshkosh" kind of businesses. They've been operating in the basement of a home on a quiet street since 1942. Most of the employees are still from the family. Last month, Sarah, Andy and I realized after four decades in Oshkosh that we had never been there, although we have always been aware of it. We bought two boxes at their tiny retail counter, at the bottom of the stairs.

It just happens that the boxes are exactly the same size as two 24mm wide boxes and two 60mm boxes, like it was made for a stereo medium format camera. The white cardboard may seem suspect for opacity, but it's heavy grey cardboard covered by a white glossy paper with alligator embossing. The boxes are 45mm deep, but I already have a stereo camera at that angle of view, so it was cut down to 35mm, getting pretty darn wide angle for stereo - an 80-degree angle of view. Most lensed stereo cameras have "normal" angle of view, at 75mm for this format. There's one stereo pinhole camera this size that's even wider at 28mm.

I made it without any kind of template, just laying out parts with a pencil and ruler. One problem here was I made the holes on the front a little too small. They were wide enough, but I couldn't put the upper pinholes any more than 8mm above the axis without blocking part of the image. That's not as dramatic as my normal 11mm rise, but it still was useful in keeping verticals parallel.

Both front and back feature the top of the box, with the shutters on the inside.

Once again, I stole the four .25mm pinholes from the stereo solargraphic project cameras last year.

As soon as the camera was finished, I loaded it with a roll of Cinestill 800T, which I'd never used before, and rushed down to Hughes' to initiate it. They were very gracious and let me take several photographs.

When the film came out of the wash, I was horrified to see I had been cursed by the demons of analog photography. Random light leaks were all along the film's length. In some pairs, the right frame is dark, but in one, the left is more dense. A few have leaks in the corners. Two appear to have the right frame heavily exposed as though the shutter had been partly open, but that's impossible. The shutter is one piece. If one side is partly open, so is the other. I can't explain this pattern. This also freaked out the scanner pretty badly so the color couldn't get balanced the same on most of the pairs.

This is all very disappointing but is a great learning opportunity about how your brain makes up the best picture it can with the information it's got. The light leaks appear as light areas, so I burned them into almost black and desaturated their general red tones. Think of a double exposure. Dark areas are unexposed and available to make a picture. When you merge a stereoscopic pair, your brain does the same thing. If one eye sees a dark field and the other a picture, it will just fill in the image it has. Despite these being somewhat unmatched pairs in color and density with occasional dark blobs, they all merge into a stereo picture, which is my objective, after all.

They are presented here in cross-eyed viewing format, where the left and right images are switched. Crossing your eyes makes a double image. When the middle ones overlap, concentrate on focusing your eyes on some detail in the image and it pops into depth. Some simplified graphic examples are at this link that may help learn to do this.

Here are links to PDFs with red/cyan anaglyphs and parallel Holmes stereo cards, if you're set up for viewing those.

The front porch has a neon sign identifying the house and hand lettered signs featuring special items. This is the only advertising Hughes' does. The small strip beneath the neon directs you to the side door.

 

This is particularly disappointing. Nearly a third of the left frame is obliterated, but in stereo, it's almost unnoticeable.

They let me go around the corner to part of the production area.  Look at all those marble tables, just like in my kitchen.

Our visit to Hughes' in December was inspired by having a glass of Hughes' Chocolate Stout when we went out to lunch, made in honor of the chocolatier by Fox River Brewing, which I visited next. Two young men were working in the production area and allowed me to stick the camera just inside the door. Fermenters #1 and #2 on the left are currently making Hughes' Chocolate Stout.

I bought a six-pack to pair with the Crawlers (Turtles in any other candy store) I bought earlier. There were a few wispy leaks in the shadows at the top, but otherwise the only pair matching in color and density.

Here's my view from the couch again. I thought the objects on the glass table might be interesting. One of my objectives was to see how close you could get and still get stereo. It looks like within half a meter is no problem.

 

This was all very mysterious. There are at least three layers of cardboard between the film and any light, including a layer of black foam core at the top and bottom. The film isn't expired for another year and I removed it from the original foil wrapper. There's a possibility of "fat roll" fogging, but I unloaded the camera in dim light, sealed it with "exposed" tape and stuck it in my pocket. I hate to blame the film, but I don't understand how it could have happened.

To eliminate the camera as the cause, I very carefully exposed a roll of Kentmere 100.

Back to play with the glass table in the sun room

The opposite angle from a little farther away.

Another glass table in another corner of the room.

How about a whole room. Trying to catch the sunbeam that reflects off our neighbor's window and into the dining room. It appeared only intermittently but it looks like it came out at least once during the two-hour exposure. The lights on the chandelier were only on for about 5 minutes.

Outside in the sun for a serious test of the camera's opacity, with a subject a little further away, using the rising set of pinholes. The lanai definitely sticks out from the house.

After the earth rotated back around to face the sun, another light-tightness test, again with the rising pinholes.

There was a little variance in density between the two frames in a few, but not much. Less than a stop. No light leaks. Wish I knew what caused the issues with the Cinestill 800T.

Other than the perfect size of the boxes from Hughes, I had another reason to make a wide-angle stereo camera, which would be appropriate for its local history roots. It seems ready for that project now.

Stereo Southside Sweetie has hand-drilled .25mm pinholes, on the axis and 8mm above it, 35mm from the film, in side-by-side 6x6cm chambers. The Cinestill 800T was developed in a Cinestill quart powder C41 kit. The Kentmere 100 was semi-stand developed in Rodinal 1:100.