M Y LIFE AT POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY

When I lived in Queens between the ages of 15 and 18, attending Flushing High School, I lived on a street called Kisenna Boulevard.  Today the co-op apartments on the street are inhabited by Chinese people.  When I went back to Flushing a couple of years ago to settle my mother’s affairs, I discovered that the neighborhood was a more interesting place with Chinese restaurants and shops, and now Main Street was teeming with people, like downtown Shanghai, I imagined.  When I was a boy I lived in what was primarily a Jewish neighborhood and  I spent a lot of time visiting my school mate Michael Miller’s apartment, also in the co-op. Michael’s father and mother were well-educated lefties and their home was filled with books and magazines.  What attracted me most was the pile of Popular Photography magazines, which I devoured.  I knew only a little bit about photography, but I had started taking pictures when I was 12. I became a surrogate member of the Miller family and hung out there many hours – and a good part of the time I spent reading those old copies of Popular Photography which, by hook or crook, taught me a lot about technical photography.  Little did I know that someday I would be an editor at Popular Photography.

THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 2

Silver screens, if they are well made and installed, can have minimal hot-spotting, but they still have what I call shading.  I make a distinction between hot-spotting and shading.  Although they may come about from the same reflective characteristics of the screen, shading has to do with an asymmetrical change in brightness across the screen and is typically dependent upon where you are sitting.  Shading happens quite noticeably when sitting in the worst seat in the house, say in the front row way on the extreme left or the right. In fact, the worst seats in the house for viewing a 2-D movie on a matte screen become even worse when viewing a polarized light stereoscopic movie on a silver screen from a bad seat. 

THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 1

Ah the silver screen: searchlights scanning the Hollywood sky, glamorous premiers, gorgeous actresses….  The silver screen is a term that has denoted the glamour and excitement of Hollywood since Chaplin twirled his cane. While to some it is the most visible sign of hope for the cinema for others it is a dreaded surface upon which to project those old standby 2D movies.  But there’s so much more to it than glamour – there’s dreadful science.  It’s a technology that ought to command the industry’s keenest minds, because, after all, that’s where a hundred and fifty million bucks wind up as a vibrating veneer of a hundred billion photons reflected into the eyes of tens of millions of photon consumers. That’s one big point in favor of the film industry – they have not dehumanized the customer to the point where he or she is called a consumer.  The customers are still the audience, people with feelings rather than human maws born to consume piles of chazarai labeled made in Chinese. 

OVER-AND-UNDER AND OUT

In the early 1980s, when I founded StereoGraphics Corporation, the first bit of revenue income we had came from a venture with Chris Condon of StereoVision International.  Chris was a pioneer in the projection of stereoscopic movies using a single 35mm projector.  He founded the company Century Precision Optics, which is now a part of Schneider; but he moved on from there, sold it, and created StereoVision International because he had a big hit with the ‘70s movie The Stewardesses.  The success of that film set him to work on perfecting a single film approach to stereoscopic projection and photographic techniques.  He settled on the above-and-below (also called over and under or over/under) format based on two two-perforation high subframes with the Scope 2.4:1 aspect ratio occupying the area of the academy aperture. 

LIVE-ACTION STEREOSCOPIC FEATURES

 

As reported in Daily Variety Jeffrey Katzenberg was recently heard decrying the lack of live-action stereoscopic features.  He exhorted the industry to correct this situation.  He was also quoted as musing about his motivation for going beyond the mandate of his own particular self interest, animation, by taking on the live-action cause.  But if there were more live action stereoscopic features in the theaters it will also be good for people who make feature-length animated films, like Katezenberg. 

Link to MacVideo Part 2

http://www.macvideo.tv/camera-technology/interviews/index.cfm?articleId=117128

Link to MacVideo Interview

http://www.macvideo.tv/camera-technology/interviews/index.cfm?articleId=116729