Well, if Alex sees it on Polaroid, you have to remember that Polaroid products are on the thin side in terms of gelatin, and the silver stays close to the surface, so this dispels my idea about gelatin depth being a factor.
I'd differ with you on that Jed. I can get the 3-D effect easily on a 4x5 contact print. I can also see it on a 4x5 Polaroid Type 55 print. I'm using lenses made in the 1940s, either a Commercial Ektar or a Dagor Series III.
I suspect that he is referring to prints made from the Type 55 neg on B&W papers and not in the Polaroid print itself. But what's the resolution on a Type 55 neg - it's not very high at all.
I've seen this effect with contact R-prints made from 8x10" color transparencies, so I don't even think it's particularly a B&W effect, so much as the edge sharpness and smooth tonality one gets by removing the whole optical system of enlargement (whether by projection or digital) from the process.
So if all sorts of vastly unrelated photographic materials like Azo, Polaroid prints, and Pt-Pd are able to present a 3-D look, perhaps are you guys really referring to what's termed "chiaroscuro" (Italian for clear-dark), which is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark.
Could not the lens play an important part? I'd bet those folks who use AZO or make their own papers are using high quality lenses to begin with.
Getting in over my head here but nobody has mentioned the ability of the lens to "capture" what may be a 3D effect and then the paper that can produce it.
Could not the lens play an important part? I'd bet those folks who use AZO or make their own papers are using high quality lenses to begin with.
This is a very frustrating thread for one who depends on the internet for this sort of information.
I just wish someone could show me what they are talking about here.
The closest I have (and it is great) is a reference print that I was able to purchase from Donald Miller. It, however, is an enlargement.
Don't stop the discussion, but somehow this is like hearing people talk about music (grrr!)
Matt
In this thread I have seen a number of explanations of the feeling of depth one may get from some
pictures but not others. We see perspective, focus including bokeh, resolution, charoscuro, subject
matter, all in every picture but in different degrees, sometimes contributing to and other times
detracting from the impression of depth. Ansel Adams, being an accomplished artist in music as well
as photography, saw analogies between musical and visual art. The chiaroscuro of music is made up
of the tones of the scale, and with many instruments including the human voice, the intentional
variations of pitch, and the intensity of the tones, the way one leads to another. "Phrasing" we
call it.
Everything that we perceive is made up of subjective and objective qualities. The one subjective
aspect of photography that I have not seen blamed or praised for anything is what we might call
"binocularity". It might be the stereopsis mentioned earlier. I think it is instructive to look at the pictures one considers as showing depth as a one-eyed person would see them. I have several photos taped to my wall. I am looking at one now that shows depth to me and strangely, I get more feeling of depth when I cover one eye. It is probably because I am then forced to use only the depth cues that are available to a one-eyed person looking directly at the original scene as if through a window. With both eyes, I can tell
that the photo is a flat surface. It has two of my doggy-people in it, one near and the other far. There is a curved stone stairway leading from one to the other. I am too far from the picture to get the original perspective. There are leading lines and leading tones. The lines are of high resolution. I can see the leading tones through spectacles that my year old great grand daughter has had her sticky hands on.
I do not think that we should look for the objective explanation of perceived depth. I would think of technique as allowing the illusion of depth. As with other art forms, it depends more on who did it than on how. Michalangelo saw David in a block of marble and freed him from it by cutting away everything that was not David. Nobody else would or could have used that block of marble the same way.
Matt, maybe an example demo print could be circulated???
Tom;
Interestingly enough there is a form of stereo vision based on color and on size. People who have surgery for cataracts see images of different sizes in some cases afterwards, and when this is so, they see a TV screen in pseudo 3D or with a sense of perspective based 3D.
People with strong prisms in their glasses (as I do) see color based stereo with color in layers on a flat surface. Therefore, blue and green objects seem to stick out at me and red objects are far away with black and white at the surface. This is strange on TV when a red tie is worn with a blue jacket by a person. The tie is behind them and the jacket appears to hang in front of the TV.
It becomes even worse for both the peple with cataract surgery and with me and my prisms with real 3D objects which then take on a distorted perspective in which green traffic lights appear as bars projecting out of the signal towards me, and the red light seems buried behind the signal.
PE
Tom;
Interestingly enough there is a form of stereo vision based on color and on size.
This 'form of stereo vision' is the ability to estimate distances. And that is something different than experiencing space. Stereoscopic seen is seen with two eyes or with a camera with two lenses. The normal camera has one lens and has no stereometric abilities.
People with one (normal) eye can estimate distances. They can drive a car because they have that ability. The physics of the ability to estimate distances is based on color (hue) and size. A full description can be found under the keyword ' aerial perspective', which is more important than the central perspective, and has physics nature, instead of a mathematical.
But, since the normal camera is a one eyed instrument, the aerial perspective is the basis for 'depth' in photography. And that is why I take this as a starting point.
Under certain circumstances, the central and aerial perspective are not in line and one will get strange sizes on the photographs. Stieglitz used that once in a photograph he made NYC. Abnormal buildings one would say. Just the result of an illusion as the result of perspective.
Jed
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