I’ve always been fascinated by how differently two eyes see compared to one alone. When I see a fantastic sight in the woods I close one of my eyes to see if it goes away. If so, it joins all the others that can only be remembered, not photographed with my single-eye cameras. I remember a beautiful bush I saw in the magnificent nursery/garden in Occidental.   Dew-teared branches of different coloration wove themselves through the space before me. It failed the eye-closed test, getting squashed flat into a confusing tangle of dull lines. I tried to photograph the fronds anyway, with no success.

I’ve never succeeded in taking stereo pictures myself, but I sometimes enjoy those taken by others. I saw at the Smithsonian today many stereos taken by Carleton Watkins, and they were remarkable. He took beautiful large-format collodium/albumin prints of places like Yosemite that were widely appreciated, but he took even more stereo pictures.   I perused a hundred or so that were shown via a computer with special glasses.

Not all of them were good. Sometimes they looked like paper cut-out trees or people standing in front of 2-dimensional mountains.   I enjoyed the ones of Yosemite the most, of course, especially the reflecting pond stereos. I remember one titled Reflection of the Three Sisters.   The quality of the water was just amazing. The presence of such calm water can only be sensed through clues left by a few floating twigs, but it looked shiny and deeply black. The peaks themselves look pale and lifeless at the top of the photo, but the reflected version shows them with full detail and contrast. A few tufts of grass in the extreme foreground add a lively texture. I understand what’s behind some of these features. I suspect that ultraviolet filters hadn’t been invented yet, so distant mountains looked hazy, while the reflection simply removed those polluting light waves.

I remember the transition to stereo that recorded music went though as well. By the late sixties rock music made such full use of it that listening with headphones sent the music rolling around. At least it rolled around quite a bit in my head.

Perhaps some day I will try to make my own pictures show the 3-dimensional quality that I appreciate so much in nature, so that textures and layered patterns can jump out at viewers like they do behind my always-searching eyes.

March 26, 2000