Equipment and Studio

Studio set-up Vertical Pentax Staggered Pentax Horizontal Pentax Pentax on a slide rail Olympus XAx2

Mostly I use a twin-rig Pentax K1000. It is an economical stereo camera not without it's special difficulties: these are related to the size and weight of the set-up (can't really be hand-held), and to the mechanical shutter mechanisms. I use a twin cable release made by Olympus. It is adjustable, and one can get a fairly good synchronization between the two cameras, but flash sync is a problem with this rig. The solution is a special PC cord wired in series across the two bodies, and using slow shutter speeds (1/8 sec, usually). The cameras are each mounted to an aluminum plate, with the two plates joined to make a custom bracket. The plates are precision machined, and can rock against each other, giving control of toe-in. Almost all the shooting is done with 50mm focal length lenses on the cameras (Pentax 50mm f2). This is important because most of the stereo viewers available for 35mm slides are themselves of this focal length. I recently obtained new lenses from my pro shop. They let me go through their collection to find two that had very close serial numbers. This helped me find two lenses with well matched focal lengths. Each of the thumbnail images on this page leads to a separate page with additional images and information related to that particular studio set-up or camera configuration. Instead of clicking on the thumbnails, you can Tour the STUDIO

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