View-Master Pandemic Photos
Back when the Pandemic was still early I was involved with a "Picture a Day Pandemic Project" The idea was to take a picture every single day during the Pandemic. The only stipulation was that the picture had to be taken from inside of your house. I mean this thing will be over in a month or so, so it's only 30 pictures right?
Ahhh, the optimism of youth.
We eventually called it at about day 76 as we were all running out of interesting photo ideas, but that's another story.
This one is about looking high and low for something interesting to take a picture of and finding my old View-Master.
The First Image
While digging around the house for something interesting to take a picture of, I found my old View-Master viewer and a couple of reels. The first image was pretty basic. Just a picture of one of the reels. I wasn't paying much attention, but then I read the title "Glacier National Park". What! I had no idea that one of the places I would eventually travel to and take hundreds of pictures of was a place that I had "seen" many times as a kid in my View-Master viewer. What really blew me away was finding out that I had taken a couple of the exact same pictures on my trip. Now I had a challenge. Find a way to take a picture of a View-Master Slide and then compare it side by side with one of my pictures.
Can I buy these anywhere?
Ok, the reels I have are "well loved" (beat up) and I only have 2 of the 3 reels. Time to search the internet to see if I can buy some replacement slides.
On a quick search on Amazon I found an advertisement for "Glacier National Park View-Master 3 Reels". Great! And at only $18 a steal. At least I thought so until I got the reels and discovered that View-Master is horrible at indexing images. The same #46 reel sold in 1946 does not have the same images as the #46 reel from 1948. Argh. Ok, at least it has 2 of the same images so I'll only have to use one image from original childhood set. And thankfully, given that it's View-Master each reel has 2 nearly duplicate slides for each image so I can use the best of.
(Note: Tracking down the View-Master numbering system, testing new scanners, and trying to determine the date the View-Master Reels were produced would later spiral out to other projects but for now I'm just going to talk about how the photography project went.)
So these are the images I found that I have some pretty close duplicates of.
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How to image a View Master Slide
And now the hard part. Just how do you scan a View Master Image? The image is 11.75mm wide by 10.5mm tall.
Back in 2005 I had done some scanning of family slides from the 70's and found that I got much better quality images when using my digital camera. With that in mind, I figured I would do the same for these.
I had always wanted a macro lens for my camera and this looked like the perfect use case. So, off to Amazon and a purchase of a Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro Lens with an 8" minimum focus distance.
After a couple of failed attempts with some other lights around the house, I ended up with simply taping the View-Master Reel to the Window and setting up my tripod. This really didn't work all that well as the majority of the pictures were blurry, but it did work at least a couple of times for me to get the shots.
A bit of restoration was required to remove large scratches and the like, but all and all I'm happy with the results. After cropping the images came out to about 2200x2000 in resolution. Before some Photoshop work to remove the scratches and discolored spots the images looked like this.
Results
Image 1: View of Lake Josephine from South Trail
This one is simply uncanny and my favorite. It is taken from the Lake Josephine hike trail from the south side. It's not on a major road or at a named spot. Just a spot on the trail that I thought looked scenic. And the same spot that a photographer in 1946 thought looked nice as well.
Image 2: Going to the Sun Road. Scenic view pull out east of Logan's pass.
Spot on. It also started a running joke. As a kid I always assumed that professional postcard pictures were taken from unique vantage points or required days of hiking or climbing to get that perfect shot. This photo was taken just a couple feet from a main road at a designated scenic pull out.
Image 3: The Many Glacier Hotel
This is the view from the Upper parking lot. Again the cameraman really worked hard for this one. "Hey Bob, let's just take the picture from the parking lot it will be fine". While the angle is a bit off, I think it still works rather well as a comparison. The Bus platform and entrance canopy was added in 1957 and I found a note that Four Chimneys below rooflines were removed in 1956. There is no mention on when the flag pole was removed.
In Conclusion
A wonderful little project with some technical challenges and a bit of detective work. It's also going to spawn a few more projects like a revisit of the 2005 page on scanning and digital cameras, and a trip down the rabbit hole to try and figure out the View-Master naming and indexing system. But for now, Enjoy!
May 2020