Sauk County Historical Society's photo collection now online

Shortly after I helped upload the Reedsburg Library's historic photo collection to Flickr, the Sauk County Historical Society has decided to do the same.  I'm happy to see that this great image collection (of more than 30,000 photos!) is now available for public viewing.  View all of their image sets here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sauk_county_historical_society/sets/

The Historical Society's collection, which includes 6 times as many images as the Reedsburg Library's collection, includes images from Baraboo, The Army Ammunition Plant, Merrimac, Leland, Lime Ridge, Prairie Du Sac, Spring Green, Sauk City, the Al Ringling Circus, Devil's Lake, and many more places in Sauk County.  Check out the above link to see more.

Also, did you know there used to be a giant water slide at Devil's Lake?? Why would they get rid of that?

See some more of my Flickr favorites here (recent favorites are mostly from the above collection).

H.H. Bennett Wisconsin River photos in 3D

On Tuesday, I took a canoe trip down the Wisconsin River starting just west of Blackhawk Island State Natural Area, ending near the River Walk and downtown Wisconsin Dells.  I passed by several of the sites landscape photographer H.H. Bennett helped make famous during his career photographing the area from 1865 to 1908.

Afterwards, I made a visit to the H.H. Bennett Studio and Museum to see Bennett's work up close.  One of the highlights of the museum was seeing Bennett's images for the first time in 3D as the stereoscopic images he started making in 1868.  Bennett started making the stereoscope images because he realized "that the three dimensional aspect of the rock formations would be lost in two-dimensional photographs." (1)

At the museum, the Bennett stereoscopic images are viewable in 3D by using a set of glasses which separate the right-eye view from the left-eye view.  I thought, "I wonder what other ways people people could see these images in 3D?"  I recall that there are some 3D televisions out now, but that can't be cheap. Then I remembered that I had seen a post by Marcos Torres on abduzeedo.com using animated gif images to fake a 3D effect.

So, I present here the gimmicky (and mildy annoying) but cheap & easy method of displaying one of Bennett's photos in 3D.  By quickly switching back and forth between the left- and right-eye views of the stereoscopic image, we can visualize some of the three dimensionality of the scene:

Looking out of Boat Cave, Image ID 75053
Used with permission from Wisconsin Historical Society

What I would like to try next is using some of the 3D features in Photoshop CS4 to create a limited 3D model using the stereoscope images.  I have seen plenty of tutorials on making stereoscope images from 3D models, but have not seen any 3D models derived from stereoscope images.  There must be a way to use something like the animated gif method to create a smoother animation showing off some of the three dimensionality of the scene.

It would be cool to have a slow pan from the left-eye view to the right-eye view for something like a documentary.   Got any ideas?

You can read more about the Bennett collection and see more images on the Wisconsin Historical Society's website or on their Flickr page.

Reedsburg area historic photo collection now online

I am proud to announce that the Reedsburg Public Library's collection of Reedsburg-area historic photos is now online for public viewing.  The collection of over 5000 historic images from Reedsburg, La Valle, Loganville, Rock Springs, Plain and Ironton is now viewable HERE.

The image collection has been housed on CDs at the library for the past 10 years; now is the first time the public will be able to browse the images online.  It is a remarkable collection, with some of my favorite images being area soldiers, 1970's Halloween costumes, big bucks, kids, wild fires, swimming holes, early settlers, Indian natives, cigarettes, fun people, the Badger Theater at its best, and local cartoons.

For the past several months, I have been talking with Reedsburg Public Library director, Sue Steiner, and staff about the challenges and benefits of putting the historic photo collection online.  Our goal in putting the images online is not only to provide a valuable resource for area people, but also to provide more exposure to the collection and encourage sales of full-resolution versions of the images.  The library currently sells full-resolution images for $5 through the request form on their website.

With support from the Reedsburg Public Library and a grant from the Sauk County UW Extension, Arts & Culture Committee, I was able to go forward with the project by transferring the library's 19 GB photo collection from 37 CDs onto my computer, use Picasa (free) software to organize, edit, annotate, tag, (even made a map) and then upload the collection to Flickr.

Here are a few photos from the collection:

Please take a moment to browse the collection on your own, and if you find an image you really like, consider buying it at full resolution!  Also, if you have information about any of the photos, feel free to leave comments.