PHSC - My Two New Best friends - Paul Pasquarello

Paul Pasquarello is Supervisor, Photographic Operations in Corporate Services at the New York Power Authority. He majored in art at college. Before graduating, Paul took a summer job as photo journalist with the Courier Express, Buffalo’s morning newspaper and stayed with them for nineteen years until the paper folded in 1982. While most photojournalists favoured baseball bat size long focus lenses, Paul liked to use wide-angle & fish-eye lenses. Early on, he dabbled in stereo using a 35mm camera and a slider bar on a tripod.

Anamorphic Stereo. While attending a National Stereoscopic Association (NSA) conference in Rochester, he met an older couple using 55mm anamorphic lenses from the days of Cinemascope. Movies shot with anamorphic lenses “squished” the ultra wide image to fit the 2:1 aspect ratio of a traditional frame making objects on the negative tall and skinny. A complementary lens on the projector restored the aspect ratio and projected a wide-view image with an aspect ratio of about 2.39:1.

Anamorphic stereo is expensive requiring two expensive anamorphic lenses on a custom made stereo camera (and polarizing filters to correct colour saturation and reflections) plus anamorphic projection lenses on the projectors. Paul‘s elaborate slide show set up consisted of two synchronized Ektagraphic projectors and a sound system. Polarizing filters on the anamorphic projector lenses separated the two stereo halves. The audience wore similar polarizing glasses so each eye saw only its respective half of the stereo pair. In passing, Paul noted that eye problems limit his stereo perception to about 30% of average so he sometimes needs a bit of help even when using the special focusing slide to carefully align the stereo halves.

Subjects. Paul chooses his subjects carefully, making good use of near and distant objects and rich colours. The stereo effect brings near objects, like tree branches, right out over the heads of the audience while the “Cinemascope” width gives an added feeling of reality to his slides. Paul has 25 or 30 boxes full of “keeper” slides. His first tray of slides covered Buffalo, Oshkosh museum, the US west and parts of Europe. The slides were a selection of his work taken from the trays of other shows he has presented. Most of his slides are colour taken on Kodak Ektachrome or Fuji Velvia. His second tray held a selection of slides taken in Venice, Italy (shooting was especially difficult due to the contrasty light and relatively slow film which is a contrasty medium itself). The small sample shown here cannot do justice to the beauty of the images projected in widescreen stereo.

Taking. The slides were taken with a custom joined pair of Nikon FM cameras. PHSC members first heard of this novel concept of joining two ordinary cameras together when Sam Smith presented his talk on “Stereo with Home-made Cameras” back in September 1996. Sam brought a number of his siamese concoctions to the meeting. Paul’s two Nikon FM cameras were carefully joined together by a camera repairman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The technician now works through Jon Golden of 3D concepts in Massachusetts.

Paul now uses f/2.8 ISCO anamorphic lenses. Earlier anamorphic lenses by ISCO had a pre-set aperture making them awkward to use. Paul would have to open the lenses to focus then stop down to shoot. He noted that it is still a challenge to keep the two lenses in focus. This is helped by stopping the lenses down to f/11or f/16 and zone focusing for 10 feet to infinity with a “friction lock” added to each focusing ring. The heavy camera and reduced exposure through the polarizing filters on already relatively slow 100 ISO film makes a tripod mandatory to reduce shake and blur. If possible, Paul avoids catching passersby in the shots as their movement would affect the stereo feeling.

Showing. The Cinemascope fad has faded into history along with the remarkable ISCO anamorphic lenses. Paul was fortunate to pick up his pair about ten years ago (you may find some on eBay from time to time). In the 1970s (35 years ago) ISCO made both camera and projector anamorphic lenses. Paul’s projection lenses came with a Kodak cone making it simple to fit them to the Ektagraphics. For more elaborate presentations, Paul uses two more projectors to allow a seamless dissolve from one stereo pair to another.

New Experiments. Like PHSC member Stan White, Paul has become fascinated with infra-red stereo. He has a Nikon D1 that was converted for IR and is now experimenting with black and white stereo using the Nikon D1 on a slide bar. Check out the Life Pixel site for more information on the why and how of converting digital cameras for IR.

Paul also shoots stereo with Hasselblad’s now discontinued panoramic 35mm camera, the XPan. Visit Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape site for a review of the XPan. Two XPan cameras can be mounted as close as 3.2 inches apart (the camera dimensions won’t accommodate the preferred 2.5 inch spacing). Paul uses Cabin 6x7 projectors to show the resulting slides.

Pan-American Exposition. In 2001, our neighbour city, Buffalo NY celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Pan-American Exposition with many events including a world exhibit and a stereo convention hosted by the NSA. You can see highlights of the 2001 convention on the NSA web-site. Paul joined some friends to put together a 3D show of Pan-American Exposition slides. A call was made to all stereographic collectors for slides and several made their collections available to the group. Some collectors had six or eight copies of the same view, so the group was able to choose the best version of each image. Dr. Frank Kowsky, an Art History Professor, wrote a script and friend and local radio personality, John Zach, provided the narration. The images were scanned and brought into Photoshop by Anne Dykstra to be cleaned up and aligned. The resulting scans were output to 120 size Ektachrome film, mounted in 2¼ square slide mounts and projected to a 12' x 12' Stewart silver screen using four Hasselblad projectors. John Weiksnar, a videographer, added the musical score and wrote the computer program that runs the show.

A DVD Project. The 2001 show ran for over one year in the auditorium of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society and was viewed by over 113,000 folks. The program has been presented to a few groups over the years, but it takes hours to set up and align the projectors. Paul and his friends have a project underway to copy the show to DVD. The left stereo images have been converted and conversion of the right stereo images is in progress. Weiksnar did some panning and scanning of the originals, à la Ken Burns, to get the best effect. Once the master DVD is completed, Paul will have to wait for a technology that will make it economical to project the slides, and make copies of the DVD available. Contact Paul via the PHSC for more information on his adventures in wide-angle and infra-red stereo.