Eve Ritscher produced some of the major hologram exhibitions in the UK, notably Light Dimensions at the Science Museum in London in 1984
"Possibly the best known work by the inventor of the Rainbow hologram"
Background to the production of Crystal Beginnings
Infinity windows are often used in commercial displays, store windows and art pieces in order to create the illusion of depth in a framed picture sized presentation. Crystal Beginnings was an optical experiment in creating a laser holographic enhanced infinity window. All infinity windows are constructions where light sources are mounted to a mirror and the light is reflected by an adjacent mirror allowing the light to bounce back and forth creating the illusion of depth. The light lost per bounce between the mirrors limits the depth of the effect to just a few inches. Crystal Beginnings, alternatively, used an array of laser pumped fiber optic emitters spaced on one inch centers as the source of the object beam. Multiple step and repeat exposures were made by moving the laser illuminated fiber optic array in one inch steps away from the recording plate for each of the ten exposures.
“Salt Crystal” was the original working title of this hologram. This image created the orderly symmetry of a crystal of Sodium Chloride. One of the key achievements with Crystal Beginnings is that the virtual crystal array appears evenly illuminated and bright at every point in the object. This project took one month of holographic lab time at Polaroid Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well as the focused effort of Dr. Stephen Benton, Herb Mingace and myself. Over 100 test exposure plates were recorded in refining the image. We exposed the hologram master plate using a highly coherent 5 Watt Argon Ion laser. This bright green laser was theoretically capable of creating a holographic scene of up to 500 meters deep. The recording was made on a Newport vibration isolation table using Agfa 8E75HD Millimask holographic plates and developed in a proprietary Polaroid holographic film developer based on Vitamin C.
Will Houde-Walter
copyright 2010
