We had our January Meeting on one of the stormiest days we’ve seen for a while.  Once we all dried out, we covered quite a bit of territory, as usual. Here’s a quick summary for those of you who couldn’t be there.

Club Business

The Senior Center where we meet has informed us that they would like to raise our rental rate from $10/hour to $15/hour. For the four hour rental period we reserved each month, that means a bump from $40 to $60 per meeting.  This is actually a significant discount from the $25/hour they normally charge, but since our dues have only just been covering our expenses, we’ll be most likely be forced to raise our dues next season to (probably) $30/year.  Our Treasurer, Brian Hogan, reported that we have (with the addition of one more club member’s dues that came in during the meeting) a total of $531 in our bank account. We won’t run out of money any time soon, but we’d also like to keep at least a $400 balance in the account, and the higher rental rate will send us down below that threshold unless we increase our dues.

There was also some discussion of finding another location to hold our meetings. A few places were suggested that might (or might not) cost less than we’re paying now. There also might be possible meeting places that would be further north, which would be closer to where most of us live. The process of finding a new place is going to take some time, and we don’t really have to make the move in a hurry, but a plea was made to the members to spend a little time looking around for options.

Show and Tell

Don Munsil brought a few things to show us this month. First he showed a Harry Potter 3D viewer and slide card set which was made by Viewmaster for Disney. The clever design of this viewer and the clever Viewmaster-like slides weren’t enough, so Stuart Turley (who formerly owned the set but traded it to Don for another even more obscure viewer) customized a second Harry Potter 3D view with achromatic lenses. These were shared with everyone during the break so we could make a side-by-side comparison of the identical viewers with different quality lenses.
Don also shared a set of German books with anaglyphic and traditional stereographic card images from Germany pre-WWII.

Photo Contests

Our PSSCC stereo photo contest theme this month was “Action” and our winners were as follows (see the photos on our PSSCC Contests page):

  • 1st – Shannon Milner’s black and white photo of a steam locomotive near Mt. Rainier.
  • 2nd – Shannon Milner’s photo of Mexican dancers in a parade.
  • 3rd – Walter Hughson’s photo of a falcon diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Our competition to select images for the ISCC resulted in six images, with two images each from Shannon Milner, Bob Venezia and Stuart Turley. They’ll be submitted to the ISCC and we’ll announce their success as soon as we know.

Photo/Video Show

Bob Venezia shared some spectacular photos he took on the island of Kauai, and Jim Johnston showed a series of images of amanita mushrooms growing on the wooded grounds of his church. Don shared a few short videos, as usual. We started the round with another incomprehensible sci-fi  demo reel from our favorite producers of Russian sci-fi demo reels, Animatrix. We followed that with a fireworks show from Japan by filmed by Takashi Sekitani,  (more at http://stereoeye.jp/index_e.html,)  some vertigo-inducing footage of Kawai shot from an ultralight aircraft, and a segment of the German TV series “Jewels of the World” about Interlochen, Switzerland.

Don showed a series of 100 late 19th century images of Russia and Finland captured from stereoscopic cards. Our final video “dessert” was a short film by 3D master John Hart called “The Fast Life” that mixed time-lapse photography, still photography and even some abstract-ish photos into a memorable art film.

It was a great meeting as usual and we look forward to our next meeting on February 8th.