My wife recently changed her Friday blog post called "Blast From The Past" to "Think Back Thursday."  The old blog was designed to get people to think back to things of the past in their lives.  The new blog is theme oriented, which I think is much better.  Last week her theme was "water" and anyone could post events envolving water such as visits to theme parks, the ocean, or even faulcets and running water, (like kids playing in a in the yard with a hose).  This weeks theme is "visiting historical sites."

To help her out, I decided to post pictures taken with a stereo camera of our visit to Williamsburg Virgina in 2000.  The stereo camera was built in the 1940's by a company called "David White" and was a popular camera.  Many movie stars and famous people actually owned one so mine may have been owned by a famous person.   Who knows?  The camera is designed to take side by side pictures on 35mm slide film.  It is more difficult to use because it is a manual camera, (manual focus, manual f/stops and shutter speed), but I love to use it.  Slide processing is expensive however, so I have not used it for a while.   The lens does not compare to modern lenses but seems quite sharp when used for the purpose for which it is designed.  Pictures are two 1/2 frame shots, meaning they use 1/2 of the normal full 35mm frame, one for the left eye to view and one for the right eye.

I include two enlargements, (at the end of the post), of the full stereo images so you can get an idea of what I mean.  The two pictures taken side by side are then mounted into a cardboard frame and viewed in a viewer, (similar to a viewmaster set only larger).  The two side by side picture scans I included can be viewed on a computer screen by slightly crossing one's eyes, similar to those "magic stereo images" seen in books and posters.  If you have seen those and know what I am talking about you may be able to master seeing these in stereo by focusing your mind on the center image between the two when your eyes are crossed.  It is best accomplished by viewing the image smaller then enlarging it until you can view it bigger.  To reduce and enlarge the image in your browser all is necessary, (usually), is to roll your scroll button back and forth.

The first pics are crops from the original stereo slides and are not viewed in stereo.  They are only the view from one eye.  Click on the pictures for a larger view.

The Windmill at Williamsburg.

Someone was naughty and ended up in the stocks!








The Governor's Palace - front gate.  No, we weren't invited for dinner.



The glass blowing shop in Jamestown, not far from Williamsburg.



Inside of a small church that was built at the settlement.


Not out of those stocks yet?


Governor's Palace - Front gate in stereo.


I hope you have enjoyed this short trip to Williamsburg.  There are many more images but these are some of my favorites.


Visit my wife's "Think Back Thursday" post by clicking on the button below.

Can you, without a shadow of doubt, tell which of these photos are taken by a professional photographer?  The answer is near the middle of the page, but please don't cheat.

Recently I had a confrontation with the photolab manager, cashier, and department manager over whether or not I could purchase copies of some photos because the cashier "thought" they looked professional.  After 20 minutes of heated debate on my part the Walmart staff decided I could not have the pictures I had just printed myself on their self service machine.  The conversation started when the employee in the photolab there, who was also  checking out my order, said he needed to see my photos before he could sell them to me.  I asked why, since I showed him the slip with the price that the machine printed out with the price clearly stated on it.  Since I printed them myself I saw no further need for him to inspect anything.  After showing him the prints he explained that he could not ring me up for them since they were obviously professionally taken.  I asked him how he knew they were professionally taken since they did not have any studio name, photographer name, or any copyright information whatsoever on them.  His explaination was that they simply "looked" professionally taken and that was enough.  With this, my dismay over the issue, and my further escalation of anger and volume several others became involved.  I later apologized for my loss of temper, asked their forgiveness and thanked them that there were at least people with the conscience to do right in this day in age.  Suprisingly, they forgave me and I went about my business.

The point is this.  Can a person with no real photography training such as the above people who understand nothing about how a copy negative or professional print really qualify to judge whether or not my pictures were indeed professionally taken?  Well, they don't need to since the burden of proof for a picture with no markings whatsover was on me.  But how can you prove ownership in such cases?  You can't.

The only reason I bring this up is this is where we seem to be headed with copyright issues and as a photographer this issue affected me personally.  If all labs take this stand how is a person to verify ownership of his own photos?  After all, will owning the original negatives mean anything in such a case.  Unless they are viewed in the eye of a real professional who has done copy work then can the person running a lab be qualified to tell the difference between a copy negative and a original photo?  How much more difficult will proof be with digital where there isn't even physical proof by having a negative at all, and Exif information on raw and jpeg photos can be forged and changed.

If every lab worker becomes the "copyright police" how can we defend ourselves? What if one day I take my negatives into a photolab to prove my copies are owned by me and the person decides he will confiscate them and all of my original photos until the police comes to arrest me? What kind of problem will any amatuer  photographer run into when he sends his photos out for printing to a lab far away?

For now, most copy places only question copies of documents, photos and prints if they are printed by them, not self service.  Is this a sign of the changes to come where every document of any type is inspected by non-qualified people?  Oh, I almost forgot, picures 2,3,5 and 6 were definitely taken by me and I am not a professional photographer.  Pictures 1,4 and 7 I am not sure about but and may have been taken by my grandfather.  Picture number 4 has a number that looks like a type of file system number written on it.  These three pictures are of my mom when she was 7, 14 and 19 years of age.  I am 56 and she died at the age of 56 in 1989 which, if my math is correct, makes the photos between 71- 59 years old.  None of the photos have studio or photographer ownership markings of any kind since largely in that day in age the photo was considered the final product, and if you owned the photo, you owned the rights to it.  These were the three photos I took to Walmart and which they refused to let me have the copies I made.

To my knowledge, copyright issues in the past largely depend on someone who feels their copyright has been infringed on making it a legal issue.  Because of the movie and music industries' power, copyright is becoming "policed" more and more.  In other words, even though there have been very few actual cases if any of photographers taken customers to court over their photos being copied, Walmart feels, at least in my case, that they can give this over run authority to it's people to decide and police it.  I only bring this up because it is a move from waiting for someone's rights being violated to actually "hunting" for violations.  I hope you can see the difference as the definitions of law goes through what is termed "the evolution of law."  It is the difference of the change in the meaning of the term "unreasonable search and seizure" as termed in our Consitution.  I suppose this was the very issue to begin with at the store.  I felt like my personal rights had been violated and of course I am sure the store would defend itself by saying I agreed to their photo policy, which I did.  But what gave them the right to decide I might have violated some law that they needed to search and seize the copies?  Can you see where I am coming from.  It's a lot like TSA searching you at the airport, or police stopping you at a drinking check point to make sure you haven't been drinking, or drug test being allowed in the work place (don't discount the fact that you haven't broken any law to start with), and all these have now been accepted into our society, when in the past we would have considered them unreasonable search and seizure.  See what I mean?

The coming of the new year will signify the demise of the Compact Disc.  Yes, you heard me right.  The music industry plans to kill off the CD sometime in 2012.  This was surprising to me as they have yet to kill off record albums which have existed since their inception and are less popular than CD's.  Evidently, people are just becoming too interested in music downloads, (Mp3 and such), and cd sales have dropped off.  I'ts hard to understand their thinking from my point of view.  The disc, which they probably pay pennies to produce, are not that unpopular and still hold quite a market.  It does however, not stand a chance against music downloads which cost almost nothing to reproduce and can be reproduced at a higher rate, can be digitally rights managed, (which cd's cannot), and have no packaging or package contents.  With downloads, shipping is not a cost factor either and companies can buy cheap computers that can spit out thousands of copies of songs by the hour with almost no human envolvement.  See the big picture?

Unfortunately what this usually means is lower quality and limited use from a consumer's perspective.  If paying for downloads becomes the exclusive future of music, then you can expect more control over what you listen to under digital rights management and cheaper sound quality, without cd's being a competitive player.  I can only lament the loss of the true audiophile who enjoyed simple yet clear stereo sound, and to my taste's, cd filled that need.  Don't get me wrong.  I love the wonderful quality of dvd audio and other hi-end surround sound, but already much of the music I grew up with is out of print and will probably never be in print again.  With the demise of the cd the chance of getting that stuff is getting even slimmer.  So with this post I want to praise the format I loved so much as well as lament it's loss by mentioning the time I first heard about CD's and my first experience with the format.

I can remember the first time I heard about compact disc.  I read it in a magazine and it sounded like the answer to all of my problems with static, noise, pops, and clicks when listening to albums. Cassette tapes were ok too, if you copied it yourself, but most of the mass produced copies were still full of hiss, bad highs, lows, or midrange or just over-modulated, and few companies were taking full advantage of it's capabilities.  Tapes made using the cheapest tape stock with the lowest quality plastic housings were the norm and sometimes these tapes didn't even play a week or so after buying them because they would bind and jam or the tape would deteriorate leaving oxide residue on tape heads causing constant cleaning.

Shortly after hearing about the new cd format I was in a music store in Dover Delaware in a sound room listening to a record album play on an expensive 1000.00 turntable hooked up to a Yamaha sound system.  I was drooling over how great the record sounded when one of the sales people who was in the room mentioned he had a copy on compact disc of the same album I was listening to.  I asked if it could sound that much different on cd?  He put the disc on but all I heard was silence.  Was something wrong?  No, it was just the lack of turntable and record noise I was used to at the beginning of playing a record.  Then the music started and it sounded like the orchestra was in the same room, only with no scratches, pops, clicks, or noise between tracks, and with much better range.  When he showed me the disc I was amazed so much sound came a disc about 1/6 the size of a record.  He told me it was more durable than a record too since nothing touched the disc surface when playing.  He then did something you would never do with a record.  He threw it on the floor, picked it up, wiped it off with his sleeve, and played it again in the cd player.  It played perfectly with no skips or clicks.  Needless to say, I wanted a cd player from that moment on, even though I recall there were probably only 5 cd compilations available in the U.S. at the time.

Some time later I purchased a cd player for about $80.00, (a bit of money back then), and my first disc.  It was a disc from Radio Shack and cost me around $10.00.  I still have that first disc and it still plays perfectly the same as the day I bought it.  I read so many complaints about how the sound of a compact disc isn't as good as an album.    Of course most of my discs are only 16 bit mastering instead of 24, but I will take a cd over a record album any day.  I have a good turntable and a reasonably good cartridge for it.  Even with the best record cleaners you still have to put the album away and go through the cleaning process over and over everytime you listen to it.  No matter how careful you are you will eventually get that scratch you are trying to avoid.  Besides this, the more you play it the more wear it gets.  You can of course record your albums and have a really great cleaning system, (and I do), but you still have that maintenance and care and you will never get away from it.






































As with records, this probably won't end the use of the cd by all companies that use it.  It most likely will affect only the big hitters like Warner, Sony, and the major labels.  Smaller companies will probably still use cd's until at some point it may just become a fad like the revival of LP record albums and 45's from companies like “oldies.com.”  In any case, I will still buy them until I can no longer get a drive to play them in.