A Steamy 3-D Trip to Charleston in 2003
It was July and I was in South Carolina...my first trip ever to South Carolia...and it was July. Can you say hot and humid? Well, you might be able to say it, but you have not experienced it unless you've gone to someplace like New Orleans or Charleston in the summer. The place was SOAKING wet and everything smelled like it had been wet for ages. The hotel was damp, the convention center was damp, my rental car was damp, and the ground was very very damp.
To add insult to injury, it rained and rained. Thus, what
started off damp, became wet, and what became wet, quickly became flooded. The result of the
rain (which occurred pretty much every single day I was there) was flooding and a generally
dreary stay. Many natives apologized to me about their weather, but the experience was
apparently quite typical for the area and the season.
The primary upshot of this cornucopia of precipitation was that there just wasn't a lot of sun. On one hand, this was helpful as the air quickly became unbearably steamy when the sun came out (the rain having done nothing to cool things off), but it was also problematic. My plans to go touring the area and take in the scenery were cut short by the reality of the weather that was usually too hot to be outside in and too darned wet as well (and hot and rain are a very bad combination)!
However, as you can no doubt tell from the picture above, the sun did come out and we did get some nice enough photogenic moments (I hesitate to describe hot and steamy as good weather), but I get ahead of myself. I didn't go to Charleston for the nice cool climate. After all, that was what I had just left in Wisconsin!
The purpose of my visit to Charleston was to attend the 29th Annual National Stereoscopic Association (NSA) convention there. I had been looking for a vacation in the Summer and had been thinking about British Columbia but I didn't have any good plans. But when I ran into some old friends (Dean and Carol Kamin) at an antique show in Madison and they told me about this show, I suddenly knew what I really wanted to do for my summer vacation. Going to South Carolina to do some MASSIVE antiquing sounded like just the thing to me, and so I went.
The idea of spending a week with a bunch of photographers might not sound terribly exciting (the fact that they are 3-D photographers probably sounds even worse!), but that wasn't the point. The big thing that I was after was shopping and I got a lot of that in. The official center of the sales was the Trade Fair (see left) -- an entire ballroom of folks selling stereocards and 3-D equipment. For someone who drives hundreds of miles to find just a few dozen cards, this place was a Mecca.
Shopping was not just limited to the Trade Fair. For the first couple of days, dealers sold out of their hotel rooms and "room hopping" was a way to try to dig up some early bargains. Because I did not show up until Friday morning, I missed most of the good room hopping days, but I did hit a few rooms.
Recognizing that this was a rare opportunity to truly increase my holdings, I knew I would want a lot of what was there so I wentequipped with a generous "allowance" and I made it a point to buy and buy and buy. Life was truly good and I had some good hauls.
The stats:
If I had felt motivated to spend money foolishly, I could have taken part in the Friday night auction -- but the prices being raised at this auction were unbelievably high. Lithographic black and white cards (worth perhaps $4-8) were going for nearly ten times their value! It was amusing to watch, but I focused my desire to part with my money on the dealers directly.
So, what did I do when I wasn't shopping? There was a theater showing 3D photography all day long. Now, this has a serious potential to be simply like watching someone's family photos, but some of them were quite good. My favorite was a sequence about a glass scupltor (cut glass sculpture is quite pretty in 3D). There was also weird stuff like some pretty obnoxious rock videos in 3D (just in case you need your obnoxious rock music in a third dimension). I apparently missed a stunning show about China. So, much like a family slide show, occasionally there are surprising gems amidst all of the chaff.
To watch these shows, of course, you need to wear
special glasses and every attendee got a set of three glasses to wear. The red and blue glasses that
folks are familiar with from 3D movies were there, but I never used them. Instead we tended to
use the clear ones that act more like those polarized lenses you wear after you've been to the eye
doctor and they've numbed your eye.
Now, if I'd spent the whole convention sitting in a dark room and watching shows and shopping at the Trade Fair, it would have been a pretty boring vacation. Thankfully, I made a few friends. The key amongst these was Dave who ended up being great company during the trip. I first ran into him during the dinner break on Friday night. We chatted about stereocards and he suggested we go out and grab a bite to eat (which we did at a local Piccadilly Cafeteria).
Dave is a modern 3D photographer and that made for an interesting contrast since what I do (collect old photos) and what he did (take new ones) were pretty much diametrically opposed. In fact, I noticed that at the NSA, there really were two groups -- those who collect and those who make -- and the two groups really don't have much in common.
But Dave made a good effort to try to convince me to try taking my own. It is true that I enjoy taking photos as well as collecting them, but the idea of investing in 3D photography equipment when I know so little about it is quite intimidating. Someday, Dave promises, he'll let me borrow his cameras and try my hand at it.
Over dinner at the Piccadilly with Dave, we had decided that we would go out together and take some pictures. The problem was when. Our original plan was to go out on Saturday morning early, but Saturday morning it rained and rained and we abandoned that plan. But in the afternoon the sun came out and I was so tired of shopping anyway, that it looked like our opportunity had arrived.
I honestly had no
idea what to expect of historic Charleston or what to look for, so it was probably a good thing
that Dave had a guide book that even laid out a series of walking paths that we could take to see
the sites. We didn't necessarily pay so much attention to what everything was, but we enjoyed
taking it all in visually.
The thing about going around and taking pictures with a serious stereographer like Dave is that for every picture I took, Dave needed to take three. One with his regular 2-D 35 mm, one with his stereo 3-D 35mm (which is what he's holding in the picture on the left), and one with a viewmaster camera -- yes, the same little viewmaster pictures you might remember from childhood! Not that I minded or anything, but I did have to tease him a bit. Doesn't he looked pretty darned professional lugging around three sets of cameras? I, on the other hand, just had my little Kodak digital that took these pics.
As for Charleston itself, I think I was rather struck by all the palm trees. While I associate palm trees with the West Coast and with Florida, the idea of seeing them in the South struck me as a bit odd. Just not used to being in such a humid place with them, I guess -- a combination of things that I was not expecting.
Historic Charleston, as you can see from these pictures has fabulous old buildings that are probably a lot nicer to look at than live in. They didn't necessarily look comfortable and everything was pretty crammed in. They looked more to be the type of places that one rents for a week or one uses to host a big social gathering (everywhere we looked, there were weddings taking place -- a summer wedding in Charleston is apparently a big deal!).
Charleston is as old as any place that you would find in New England and has all of the colonial airs of Boston (which I had just been at the week before on business), but you would never confuse the one with the other. This is very definitely a Southern city with that nice leisurely Southern pace of life.
The slave market
(see left) is one reminder of that legacy as well, of course, although the cheery quality of historic
Charleston tends to ignore those darker pages. But there are less obvious ways to be reminded
that you are treading in a different world from Wisconsin. Consider the grave stones in the
cemeteries, like this one on the right, for a seventy-nine year old town matriarch that humbly
announces, "She hath done what she could." Similar epitaphs find their way on the memorial
stones here.
The fountains are beautiful and on this beautiful but very very humid Saturday a welcome sight. The kids certainly enjoyed playing in them and, if I had had a bathing suit, I would have enjoyed joining them. If it seems like I keep mentioning the heat and humidity it is because it was so hard to avoid when I was there. And these pictures hardly give you a good feeling for how painfully uncomfortable it was for a Northerner unaccustomed to it.
I mentioned the colonial quality of Charleston. I think the two pictures below illustrate that very nicely. They look like something you would find in historic Baltimore, Philadelphia, or somewhere in New England.
But then you have a scene like the one below, with the palm trees, and you know that you're not even in Williamsburg. No, you're probably in Jacksonville or Miami or someplace like that.
The last image is a sign that we found on a door and puzzled over for some time. As we did so, the owner actually surprised us by walking out of the door. He seemed unfazed by our interest in his sign (perhaps from having to explain it to hundreds of hapless tourists before) and he helped us decipher it. Can you figure it out? [Hint: Try saying it aloud and keep in mind that the painter was going for an economy of verbage]
"Be ye man or be ye woman/Be ye soon or be ye late/Be ye going or be ye coming/Be ye sure to close this gate."
So what else happened during my trip? All sorts of things:
But of course the best part was getting home with all my loot.....
