Stereo Photo--Eclipse Totality

 

I'm sure everyone knows there was a total solar eclipse last week. It was harder than I expected to make it into the path of totality--my planned ride had car trouble--but it was totally worth it (pun intended). We did have clouds, but they cleared up enough to give a great view. My phone camera wasn't really up to the task, but I tried to take a 3D photo during totality. We could see Venus and Jupiter. Four minutes feels like a really long time when the sun has just gone dark in the middle of the day! I'm posting the same photo with and without the moon edited darker in Photoshop, since the light shining around the edges confused the camera focus and washed it out. The edited photo looks more like it did in real life. It's as close as I could get to bringing totality home to show my friends and family members who weren't able to travel there. 

Life of Christ Stereo Cards--The Last Supper and the Appearance to Mary Magdalene

 

Happy Easter! Today I thought it would be fun share a few more of the Life of Christ stereograph cards from my collection. I've already shown the full set of twenty-four that were printed in color, but it's interesting to see the difference between those and the hand-colored ones. Those twenty-four pictures can be found in both versions (as well as in black and white), but there are also a number of pictures that don't seem to have been reprinted in color. The hand coloring is a bit garish to the modern eye, but some of the scenes are quite interesting. Among these are cards showing Jesus washing the disciples' feet, the Last Supper, and the post-resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene. It is easier to tell on the hand-colored cards that they were originally photographed from beautifully detailed dioramas. Unfortunately, they also seem to fade more easily. These have been color-corrected to be less yellow, but there's nothing I can do for the fading. They do look better in 3D, though.

Life of Christ Stereo Cards--Between Christmas and Easter

 

Since it's almost Easter, I thought it would be a good time to share the last three of the twenty-four colorful Life of Christ stereograph cards I posted a while ago. These are the ones that didn't fit easily into either an Easter or a Christmas post. I used Photoshop to remove a couple of blotches that I found distracting, but otherwise these didn't need a lot of alteration. One shows Jesus at age twelve, talking to the teachers in the temple, and the other two show the wedding at Cana and the Sermon on the Mount. Earlier posts about this set are related to Christmas, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), and Easter. These cards appear to have been generally sold in a set of twenty-five (the box advertises twenty-five, and many different-themed sets of twenty-five cards were available in identical boxes) but the twenty-fifth card could be any of a fairly wide variety with some relevance to Jesus or the holy land. I think that means that these twenty-four were a proper set, but an additional card was added to give the original purchasers their money's worth; that would be easier than printing separate boxes for a set with one less card. These same views can also be found in black and white, sometimes colored by hand. There are actually several more scenes in the black and white set that I wish had been printed in color!

Three Strange Years: Daily Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic

 

My pandemic diary is now available in paperback! I kept the diary on social media while COVID-19 was upending everything, and it seemed important to preserve it, so it's now available on Amazon here. Obviously I've been working on this one for a while, since I started writing it at the end of March 2020. Originally it was simply meant to fight loneliness while everything was shut down, but it grew into a detailed look at daily life over three historic and really strange years. At heart it's a celebration of family love and simple pleasures--novice gardening and other new hobbies, socializing at a distance, and being there for each other the best way we knew how. The ups and downs of life during the pandemic, captured in real time, are never to be forgotten.