From: nurkse@landfill.Eng.Sun.COM (Peter Nurkse)
Newsgroups: rec.photo
Subject: aerial views
Date: 11 Jan 1993 20:19:48 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, CA
Distribution: ba
NNTP-Posting-Host: landfill
Keywords: stereoscope


 This message was prepared for an internal Sun alias of people from Santa
Cruz. I'm posting it to rec.photo, to find out if there are other public
libraries of stereo aerial photographs in the Bay area, like the one at
UC Santa Cruz. A library will have to have a good quality stereoscope
to be useful.

 Please reply to me personally, and I'll combine any suggestions and post them 
to the alias.

Peter Nurkse
nurkse@eng.sun.com

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Today's Santa Cruz Sentinel has a 4 column picture of a panoramic aerial view
of Santa Cruz in the summer of 1906, taken from a camera mounted to a string of
17 kites flying off Lighthouse Point. It's an extraordinary picture, rich in
social, cultural, geographical, economic, architectural, agricultural, and
geological information. And it's also a direct view right back into the past,
you can feel as if you are looking directly back into 1906 yourself. The
newspaper reproduction doesn't have any of the precise and subtle details of
the original, but there's information in the article how you can order your own 
copy of this historical photo (suitable for framing) directly from the Library 
of Congress.

 At the Map Room at the McHenry library at UCSC, they have a copy of this photo 
(and also 1906 aerial views of S.F., San Jose, and Salinas, all taken by the 
same kite photographer, George Lawrence). But at the Map Room they also have a 
very complete library of stereo aerial photographs of Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, 
San Mateo, Monterey, and San Benito counties, from the 1920's to the present. 
The UCSC Map Room is equipped with a table mounted Dietzgen professional 
quality photo stereoscope, built just for viewing stereo aerial photographs 
(much higher optical and mechanical quality, and also much easier to use, than 
the portable handheld stereo viewers you may have seen).

 When you view a pair of stereo aerial photographs, you see a reality that you
will never see with your own eyes---unless you find a way to move your eyeballs
a quarter mile or so apart. Because you are viewing two photographs taken at
intervals in a sequence from a plane flying in a straight course, all depth
perception is vastly intensified. One story houses push up from the
ground---two story houses explode up from the ground---chimneys poke up above
rooftops---trees lunge up towards you---cliffs literally dive down to the
ocean---canyons are deep slashes in the landscape.

 You can even peer down into the inside of three small limekilns still standing
at the UCSC entrance, long before UCSC was ever imagined. If you are viewing a
60 year old pair of photos of your own neighborhood in stereo, the sense of
looking directly back into the past is even more intense. You expect to see
motion, people walking down the streets. And if you reverse the photographs in
each pair, you will see the world as no one can ever see it, inside out, depth
reversed, cliff tops sunken beneath the ocean surface, trees poking downward
into the ground, rooftops at the bottom of house sized holes.

 The available photographs cover all of Santa Cruz county, from about 1930 to
the present (plus at least portions of the other counties mentioned above). You
can study the development of your neighborhood over the years. If you live out
of town, you can count the trees on your land before you ever set foot on it,
check the grading 50 years ago, and see when roads were built. Or look at the
growth of the city of Santa Cruz (the narrow houses in the old Chinatown down
by the river are very distinctive). Or just take a tour around the county,
looking at literally everything, at whatever period you choose, from 1930 on.

 The only problem is, the Map Room keeps normal business hours, 9 to 5
weekdays. But whenever you have a day off, or leave late, or get home early,
it's worth a visit. You can all the Map Room directly at 459-2364, if you want
to check beforehand on some specific materials in which you're interested.

Newsgroups: rec.photo