My wife bought me this yesterday. We have a charity shop in town that seems to specialise in cameras at times. Every so often, they'll have something interesting. Yesterday, they had this.



It's a Wray Stereo Graphic camera - which is why it has two lenses (obviously). It takes 35mm film. There's some Kodak Gold in it now - I have no idea how light fast it is, but I'll find out when I get the film processed. You get around 15 shots from a 24 exposure film.

It's an odd thing. It has a fixed shutter speed (1/50 second) or one you have to manually time or use with a flash. You can control the aperture using a knob on the front, which has some useful words on it like "hazy" or "bright". There are also f-stop numbers, but there's no automatic exposure settings, so you have to either use a light meter or "best guess" and pick the right word.

There's no focussing either. Some Googling tells me that it has a special system in place that makes everything in focus (read: focus on infinity). Not a bad thing, really. This isn't an SLR, and focussing would have to be based on known measurements or more guesswork.

The viewfinder is this tine 3x3 mm hole round the back. It's hardly useful for anything other than as a rough guide.

I've not taken any photos with it yet - but I'm hoping that if the weather holds out over the next few days, I'll be able to take it with me to a few places to try out.

I want one!
Love to see what comes out of it when you're done.

I've just checked prices on eBay. Blimey. I hope you got a bargain!

It cost £30 including the case, which is in pretty good nick. Looking at eBay prices, I think we did well, and the money goes to a local hospice.

Actually, from what I can gather, the "focus on infinity" bit is not true. Each lens has been focused on a different point, which gives a deep focus in the stereo image.

Here is an "out of the can" photo from the camera.



The frames are really bunched together on the film - this means that pairs are not together, but about 3 frames apart, which means working on pairing each image and making sure I have the right image on the right side. There is also a lot of colour correction and cleaning up of dust marks. This seems to be something I had forgotten that you get with analogue cameras. A blast with some air in the camera's body may help.

This is an image of Blackmore, a village somewhere between Chelmsford and Kelveden Hatch. I took a few shots there the other day. I used Kodak Gold 200 ASA film. It seems that the camera's settings assume a 200 ASA film. I was worried I'd be over exposing the film - if anything, I feel I may have under exposed a tad.

Very nice!
Dust marks might be from the lab, especially if you're using a high street place. They seem to have forgotten that they need to dust out the scanner from time to time, judging by the results I've had lately. The negs are fine, the scans often aren't. Which is ok, I can scan at work.

I used a high street place purely for processing. I scanned the negs myself, so the dust may be home grown. I'll give the scanner another dusting and try again.

So rescanned and have processed the images. There is a rather nice “other worldly” quality to them - probably because the lenses aren’t that great, and partly because it’s film, and for most of us here, photography is pretty much digital.

Click for large view - Uploaded with Skitch

This is pretty much what you get. The frames are very tightly packed on the negatives, so you get the occasional bit of overlap. The 3D effect works well. To see it, you’ll need some optical help.

To see the lot from Blackmore, visit my site. http://www.worldofpaul.com/stereocards/ ... =blackmore

The site’s viewer has been designed to work on an iPad - the cards should appear just a bit smaller than Holmes cards (the standard size for Victorian viewers), as they have been designed to work with Brain May’s OWL viewer.