It was nice to hear from Rita and John Pearle, and that they plan to
attend the meeting at Didcot and exhibit some of their excellent colour
prints, make from their slides.
After the sad loss of Major, a year past April. Rita and John continue
with their photographic and processing adventures. Recently they have
also been busy renovating their home and are gradually getting things
together. By way of a welcome break they also dusted off their caravan,
after four years of un-use, plus fitting a new set of tyres, and enjoyed
a few days in Birmingham (Rita`s home town) and, as Rita says: "We
had kept up our membership of the Caravan Club and found a suitable
place to stay at Kings Norton, which was an organic nursery/farm with
two donkeys and lots of chickens and ducks and only seven miles from the
Birmingham University where we planned to visit the Annual Festival of
Science.
We had applied for the programme and sent off the money for a series of
lectures. One was on the Hubble Space Telescope and they had some
fantastic slides of gas clouds and nebulae in gorgeous colours. Another
lecture was put on by Kodak on the future of photography, given by one
of their top representatives in Europe and he really knew his subject.
The whole lecture was very reassuring about the future of the use of
film, and processing. However he saw the future of photography as being
a hybrid combination of film and digital manipulation with pictures
being scanned by lasers and manipulated in printing- also by laser. This
took less time than printing with paper and chemicals and was nearly as
good quality. He said that they expected the quality of films to improve
by 10x in the next ten years, but the best news from our point of view
was that the future of film and processing was secure - there is just no
comparison with digital pictures - but then with all this coming from
Kodak - they would say that, wouldn`t they?
We went to several demonstrations - one was an Indian professor who
showed us some fantastic pictures of liquid crystals under the
microscope, and lit with polorised light. We missed a couple of lectures
talking to him and peering into his microscope and he gave us several
pictures and a piece of crystal on a slide to try for ourselves - but we
haven`t had time to do that since we got back.
Another
lecture and demonstration that we enjoyed very much was about a compound
lens - like a fly`s eye,
that was made from plastic and
could produce 3D slides and didn`t need special glasses or anything for
viewing. We got some samples of the material but we didn`t take any notes so I am
going to write and ask them for more information. The lecturer had a couple of 2¼
square slides on a light box and they looked very impressive and were
certainly in 3D. You have to separate the two strips of film - move the
top one a bit to one side and look through them - you can see the array
of lenses that is imprinted in plastic. We don`t know yet whether the
plastic would have to be incorporated with the film or not in order to
take these pictures. I`ll let you know when we find out. It certainly
was a very interesting though, and we came back feeling that there were
lots of new and interesting things going on".
Editor:-
It is always interesting to hear personal comments on your experiences
and especially if, like Rita, you learn about up to date information on
the way film and digital imagery is heading.
Rita
kindly sent me a sample of the Lens Array material and by placing one
piece over the other you can see the multitude of tiny lenses which
allow the 3-D image to be viewed. It is quite interesting material which
I hope we can give further details of once we understand more about how
it works.