Who doesn’t love 3-D? If you ask me, we should all embrace three dimensions. After all, we do live in them. Me, personally, I’m always finding myself in line for the latest IMAX films (I especially like anything underwater, involving sharks that look like the real deal). I’ve always been a big fan of those 3-D glasses with one red eye and one blue as well as Magic Eye.
Anyway, one camera I’ve always been fascinated with is the Nimslo camera, a 3-D camera invented by Jerry Nims and Allen Lo that was introduced in the 1980s.
It’s a 35 mm viewfinder lenticular stereo camera with fixed focus and automatic exposure. It has four lenses that take four pictures all at once, each from a slightly different point-of-view. When you send the camera’s negatives for lenticular printing, the printer assembles the images together under a lenticular screen, a sort of plastic sheeting (as I understand it). The company went out of business—I think in the mid-nineties—but devout Nimslo fans still exist, by what I can tell from internet searches. You can find Nimslo cameras cheaply on eBay. Some people like to fiddle with their Nimslo cameras to adjust them to other uses.
