Stereograph cards were the way 3D images were first introduced way back in the 1880s. To view them you had to have a stereo viewer like this. I have a few of these cards. So I thought I’d share a few scans of one of my favorite subjects, Theodore Roosevelt. Below you’ll see 3 versions of each. First the original, then the image converted to crosseye viewing, then an anaglyph for use with red/blue 3d glasses.

One more: This photo was obviously taken at the same time as the one above, but here John Muir has Joined him. There must be a stereograph card of this one out there as well, but this is the original uncropped photo from the Library of Congress. Except I colorized this one in photoshop.

NOW IT”S CRAFTY TIME!

If you have one of those old stereo viewers, you can print images from this site and make your own stereocards! follow these simple instructions:

1. find an image pair on this site and on it to get a larger file.

2 Drag it to your desktop and Print it out. (You’ll have to scale them to about 7 inches wide in a photo editing program or printer application to fit those viewers.)

3. Then you’ll generally have to flip them (put the left one on the right and right on the left). This is because I post most of these for cross eye vieweing and the stereo viewers work parallel. (The stereo cards above have been posted both crosseyed and parallel ways. The smaller images will be the ones you don’t have to flip.)

4. mount them on some sort of cardboard, and voila.