Fold me close

Fold me close

Around a year ago, I rediscovered my Pentax stereo adaptor: a fitting that screws into the front of a lens and produces a stereo pair of portrait-format images on one landscape-format frame. It came with a viewer for 35mm slides shot that way, and the stereo separation is impressive.

So much of what we do in photography is about reducing three dimensions to the two that a sensor can record: so it’s interesting to be able to write about something that works the other way round, making a flat print into a three-dimensional object.



Now, there’s an old technique for putting very thin slices of two images behind a lenticular plastic overlay, either creating a stereo image, or sometimes having an image that changes from one view to another as your viewing position changes: typically, it might be an eye, opening and closing – or the clothes disappearing from a figure…

A few weeks ago, I posted two versions of a nude – colour, and sepia: this led to a fascinating email conversation with Andy Carter – some of you will have seen his wonderful light pendulum images: if you haven’t, go to his portfolio here at Ephotozine, and have a look - Acancarter. He combines an interest in the technicalities of a method with an eye for the unusual, and that’s a recipe for Interesting Things.
The upshot is that he’s produced a wonderful 3D print from the two versions of my original shot, and it arrived in a cardboard tube yesterday. It consists of alternate strips from the two images, one ‘flopped’ left to right, and then folded. From one angle, only the sepia image is visible: from the other side, only the colour. I apologise that I have censored the image a little – there’s no ‘over 18 only’ facility for blogs at present.



It all put me in mind of a some old books that I saw in a craft shop a few years ago: I disapprove of doing that sort of thing to books, but then I realised that I’d bought a supposedly erotic novel as a prop for some pictures – I felt this was no loss to the world of literature, so I folded it, and mounted it as a present for my wife.

Andy has learned a lot from his first folded print, and has plans for an improved version, using paper that won’t tend to crack along the convex folds: to see the original in all its glory, please see my post in the main gallery today, but note that it is ‘Not Suitable For Work’ – a phrase that I hate. I’m hoping that he will blog about the technical side of producing the finished work, which is way above my pay grade in Photoshop, and would try my patience and manual dexterity in the folding!