Merry Christmas, everyone!

This 1909 picture, Christmas Morning, depicts a man with a young boy on his lap and a toy horse in his hand. I imagine the boy is the man’s grandson. I’m curious about the cap he’s wearing.

I have a present for you too!

You’ve seen lots of stereoscopes on Old Spirituals. They are the side-by-side, nearly identical pairs of images that give you a left-eye and a right-eye view of the same scene. This is an example of a stereoscope photo made by photographer Carleton H. Graves:

Stereoscope pictures were very popular around the turn of the century. When you see them as they are intended to be viewed, as a 3D image, they seem almost like magic. The problem is to see the 3D image, you need a stereoscope viewer–a gadget most people don’t own and probably wouldn’t work well with a virtual image anyway. Without the viewer, they look like two regular, almost identical pictures.

I looked for a virtual stereoscope viewer a few years back and couldn’t find one but I checked again recently and some wonderful soul figured it out! The technology isn’t perfect (and my technical skills definitely aren’t) but I uploaded several pictures for you to see, including two from this post on Old Spirituals’ 3D This page.

It’s pretty easy to use. Click any picture to see the 3D version.

 

 

Once you open a picture,  you’ll see it automatically pans back and forth, but you can pause it. You can also click on the picture and move it around with your mouse to see it from different angles.

Here’s one more stereoscope image called The Christmas Tea Party, from 1906. Ah, the kids’ table…brings back happy memories!