3D photography has been regarded as the poor man's photography,
the poor relation of photography, all through photographic history.
It's very strange. It's been kind of looked down upon.
But I think there's no justification for that,
and one of my missions in life is to really put
3D photography, where it should be in photographic history.
Well, all my life I've been keen on stereo, as you probably know.
When I went to college I used to go into Christie's - Christie's auctioneers
in South Kensington. I had no money so I couldn't buy anything, but
I could view everything and I got to know what all these things did -
all these beautiful old cameras, wonderful old Victorian viewers.
So I have a good general knowledge even from those times of how things
work and how they... how they made stereoscopy a national craze.
It was huge. The London Stereoscopic Company in 1858 boasted a million views.
This is a very big time and they went all round the world, to
the States, particularly in France, where it was a huge craze as well,
and the Victorians could see the world through the stereoscope.
My own company is called the London Stereoscopic Company and obviously
it's inspired by the 1850's original London Stereoscopic Company which
became defunct about 1930, and really I've trodden a path very similar to
what they did. I'm just obsessed with the idea of people getting back into
this technology and enjoying 3D as I do.
3D is all about getting two views really.
That's what stereoscopy is.
We have two eyes and the reason we
see things in wonderful, glorious 3D around us is because our brain puts
these two slightly different pictures of the Universe together.
So what you're trying to do in 3D photography is to recreate that effect.
So what happened was, I'm eating my Weetabix cereal as a kid, about seven
years old, and out of the Weetabix packet, pops a little card.
Which looks like that. And you have two pictures side-by-side, which are
very flat and not very inspiring, but I turned it over and it says
"You must get a Weetabix 3D viewer." And here it is. And what you do is you
put the card into the viewer. Like this. It just slots in.
I'd never seen anything like this in my life. This was a revelation to me.
But you look through, and instead of two flat pictures of hippos. You have...
wow! Suddenly it's like there's a window and you could fall through
the window into the mouths of these incredible creatures. So to me this
was magic. I thought, 'why doesn't everybody do this the whole time?'
'If you can take 3D pictures, why would you bother taking 2D pictures?'
You know, 'why isn't this worldwide-endorsed?' So that was the
beginning of my complete enchantment with stereo and it's never left me.
So, with my pocket money -
two and sixpence to be exact - I found in Woolworths, this little camera.
It's a VP Twin - the first camera I ever owned. It's not a high
quality instrument, but it gave me what I wanted. And what I did was put
it on the table and go 'click'. Move it on the table, sliding, and 'click'
again and I have my two pictures and I put them together on a card.
So these are the first attempts that I made. I took a picture of
my dad decorating the kitchen from outdoors and it's not a perfect
stereo picture, but it does work. So if you put it in the viewer
like the Weetabix pictures, it works just fine. And this is in
my Queen book, reproduced. I then got my dad to do the same thing
and he took a picture of me in the garden and then he took a picture
of me on my bike, which was also very new and exciting at the time.
So these I have as little treasures from my childhood.
We all remember where we were when something that affects
us deeply happened. Like the death of Kennedy, for me,
the death of Buddy Holly.
And I remember exactly where we were when Neil Armstrong put his foot on the Moon.
That's one small step for [a] man.
I was down in Cornwall with Rog, our drummer
One giant leap for mankind.
In the very early days of Queen.
We were doing a sort of tour of Cornwall at the time, I think, with
the legendary drummer of Cornwall, who was Rog, and we're all in his
mum's house clustered around this tiny little TV screen about this size
and we all watched it. It seemed like the most incredible thing ever and
to me it still seems fresh and new and exciting. This is the space age, isn't it?
But you know, 50 years - I'm 50 years older and...
No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo
history and we thought 'can we do it?' 'Is it possible?' 'Is there
enough material?' The astronauts actually were trained in 3D. Mostly.
Although very often I think they were too busy to really remember it and
practise it, but they were taught how to do the 'cha-cha' thing, so
take a picture here, take a picture here, and eventually it would become
a 3D picture. So occasionally you're lucky enough to find one of those,
but it's fascinating. For me it's a passion. I'm completely geeky where
this is concerned so if we're on tour with Queen, I'll be back at the
hotel at 3am trying to put two of these images together, which Claudia
has sent me, and make them work as a 3D [image]. So that's what you see
in the book. In the back of your Mission Moon 3D book, you will find
what you need to view in 3D, which is the OWL Stereo Viewer.
I'm very proud of this book. I think it's one of the
most beautiful we've ever managed to make. We're quite a long way down
the line now with stereo books. I think this is the sixth book we've done.
A lot of it's been classic 3D - Victorian 3D - which I love,
but it's the same principle. And this, if anything, brings Victorian
3D technique into the 21st Century. And, you know, it's still the best.
I always had some kind of stereo camera with me and that's why I was
able to make this book because over the years touring and in studios
and whatever with with my group, with Queen, I always had the stereo cameras.
This is the analogue camera that I use; a Stereo Realist.
It's a wonderful piece of engineering, just wonderful. Made in the 1950s.
There's all sorts of little shots in here, they're sort of candid
pictures, because people were so used to me having this camera around. They
weren't self conscious, so they're nice little kind of intimate views
of what life was like on stage, but also offstage for us as a...
as a growing bunch of musicians... adventuring into the world.
So I was very happy to be able do this. This ties up a lot
of ends for me. I was glad that it actually made a book.
I wasn't sure if it would. When we started on the project I
thought 'do I have enough stuff?' But, actually we had loads.
VR [virtual reality] is the distant descendant of the Victorian
stereoscopic viewer. And yes, it is rather strange to me. Now we
can see the world; you can have a virtual reality experience of
like being beside the Pyramids, and this is exactly what the
Victorians did. The Victorians saw all these incredible places
for the first time in incredible realism in their little dark rooms
at night, looking through with candles lit and looking at their
stereoscopic pictures. So, yeah, I love it and VR has made this
stuff possible again, or it's made it more accessible because you
don't have to explain what it is to people - every kid knows what VR is.
So you present them with a stereoscope and they get it.