Upper Blue Lake (1996)

• 75%
• 1996
• James Otis

Coming to grips with landscape via pseudo-hyper-stereoscopy. Your eyes are two-and-a-half inches apart, giving viscerally felt depth to 25 feet. If your eyes were 400 feet apart, you'd see solid forms three miles distant and think your grasp extended a mile. I established pairs of viewpoints up to hundreds of feet apart and jogged between, at each shooting a few frames. Since usual depth perception is only to 25 feet, we see anything in stereo as within that distance; mountains are seen as close and, hence, small. Filming took days and days: time, too, is miniaturized; shadows creep and clouds boil. Experience land as diorama and time as summary. UPPER BLUE LAKE, although not the most successfully pseudo-stereoscopic of several such wide-eyed studies, so enthralled me with its various qualities of light and atmosphere, I persevered, for five years jogging whenever I could, 12,000 feet high in the Colorado Rockies.