Introductions - Everyone please chime in!

[mlaucks]

My name is Marc, I live and work in central Pennsylvania. I was "lured" into holography by a book offer in the Scientific American Book Club.
I had gone a long time without making an initial purchase and the "Shoebox Holography" book looked like a great way to both learn something new and satisfy my purchase commitment for joining the book club.

Physics was my favorite class in high school and I am particularly interested in the electromagnetic spectrum. I lack the advanced mathmatics necessary to fully grasp all I read about in string theory but, nevertheless, continue to read and listen to tapes about science.

I am in the process of making a hologram with my two school-aged sons.
I'm waiting for the JD-2 kit and recording plates to arrive from Integraf. So far, I've found everyone with whom I've been in contact with since buying the book more than a year ago, most helpful. The gentleman from Ross books, Alec from Integraf and Frank DeFrietas. I would like to some day to be able to make portraits but understand that I have some challenges ahead as relates to successfully making holograms in my basement.

I think the first challenge will be the $7.00 lens I received from Anchor Optics. I knew going in that it would be "experimental grade" but I didn't expect imperfections on the lens face. When I shine the Infiniter 200 laser pointer through the 15mm -12fl lens I see many concentric circles of varying intensity (these seem to be from the laser itself) and also visible are round, somewhat dark, "artifacts" for the lack of a better word.

I am optimistic that my exposure(s) will be a success and will report back in about 30 days. It will be some time before I take this project on as I need to look into how to dispose of the developer chemicals in my area.

I work in sales in the printing business and have been very impressed with the variety of holo foils available. I would like to learn how to convert the image from a plate or film onto a mylar film that could be foil-stamped onto my business card.

[Technodreamer]

My Internet name is Technodreamer. It is derived from the practice and art of Lucid Dreaming. Lol.

My interest in holography started when I watched films with many of them in. It hasn't been the first time that I've typed something sci-fi into Google, only to find that the technology now exists. it's never as simple as the programs make it out to be, but it is still exiting to see all these inventiosn come to light.

Anyway, holographics was the most advanced technology I found. So I decided to study it further. I have a few ideas, but I have no idea how to implement them.

I understand the basic theory behind holograms.

[ali dove]

Hi it's a pleasure to be able to introduce myself to such an esteemed group of Holographers. I'm very new to holography just started 3 months ago. Since then I've made 4 good transmission holograms and 5 or so reflection. I had no idea this technology was available to the general public and am very excited to be apart of it. I'm working with a student Integraf holograpy kit but hope to bump up in laser to 25mw diode from Holoworld.com My goals in holograhy are to create a H-1 and H-2, Intergram, Raindow, Multiplex and eventually a make Silver Halide and Diachromatic Gelatin. Also hope to make holo portaits from pictures. I'm a visual artist and I'm very intrested in Physics and hope to further combine the to with holography.

[Junior]

Hello!

My name is Carsten (nick: Junior) and I live in Potsdam, Germany. I have started making holograms 4 years ago with an old 2mW HeNe and soon changed to bigger lasers...
Currently I'm using a SLM-20 DPSS from CNI (I remember a discussion about this laser on the old forum long time ago) rated at 30mW. Mostly I'm doing image plane holograms on VRP-M.

Junior

[lucaslab]

Hello,
I have heard many times about how fascinating are the holograms. Although I didn't have the opportunity to see before a hologram and because I have passion for technological breakthroughs I decided to develope my owns. I inspired also (as a star-trek fun) from the holodeck! There is no relation between science fantasy and the current reality but as we have seen many times, always there is a first step to go further.
So to describe with three words my decision to create holograms are:
Inspiration
Innovation
Creativity

[dave battin]

IT all started for me in the Museum of Holography, in the late 70s. after making one visit i was hooked for life!
seeing what could be done was unbeleivable..... I then joined as a member and started to read any information i could absorb.
attending college in Boston i found all kinds of new info at the college libaries.upon graduation from college i headded west,finding work near los angles in a large machine shop, i found this very convenient for making tooling for my holographic components.
after leaving LA and returning to New York,i continued my holographic studies,and met a fellow
holographer,Mark Segal (owner of now defunct Spatial Images International)at this lab we produced a large ammout of DCG holography. A short time later a head hunter contacted me about a job working for company called Farirchild Weston Space and Camera,the job was for an optical engineer, i couldnt wait for the interview! They hired me in a flash! The optics lab was about 2500 sq.ft of total OPTICS! lenses,mirrors,lasers a gigantic isolation table (20 tons+),i spent the next five years building telephoto lenses ths size of 55 gallon drums and tiny ccd cameras that would fit in matchbox! This is where i really learned about the nature of light and optics.

[Gary Deal]

Saw an international holography exhibition at the armory near the LA Coliseum on my way into a Stones concert some time long ago (I was pre-inebriated at the time). Fantastic!
Back around '91 (?) or so I got a copy of Holography Handbook. Found out there was a holo-gallery nearby and took a trip over there, as well as to some high end art galleries at the same location. The holograms on display were quite good, some well known ones. Had a good time talking to the guys in the really high-end galleries, they were far less snooty than the people in the lesser galleries. One of them was trying to convince my wife that I'd purchased a small painting for $9k. On the way home my wife asked why I wasn't making holograms. I showed her the (retail)prices of lasers in a couple of catalogs and she understood.
Eventually I got a surplus hene and cobbled up an isolation table, spent six weeks or more tweaking it and watching the interference fringes projected on the wall until it was dead steady and had a fast stabilization. Got a box of Agfa plates from Newport Research a few miles away, and got a good transmission hologram on my first try. The spreader "lens" I used wasn't even actually a lens, more a short plastic cylinder with a conical depression in the end. It spread the beam though, and I cobbled and scrounged my way up from there. I never really achieved a high level, but I did make some H2's of a bee and some other interesting things.
After about a year I wanted to go back to shooting 4x5 film, and the price of holo-film doubled, so I packed it all up and put it away. After a move to the rural midwest I got a roll of film on ebay and got the stuff back out again.
Since then I've done a few dozen holograms, but I have way too much different stuff to do to concentrate on it much. It's more of an amusement than a hobby at this point, but I want to get the kids in on it like I did with some of the large format photography. The first time I showed my granddaughter how I made a hologram, she said "That's it? That's all you have to do?" after the five second exposure. I think they like the photography better, the holograms are more of a novelty to them.
I've been dabbling in SHSG and my own emulsions just a tiny bit, with no real success just yet. Maybe the next time I work my way around to it...
-Gary

[Eric Logean]

My name is Eric Logean.
As you can see on the left, this is my very first post in here.
I once had the chance to get a grant to live and have an experience in Japan for a year. I worked and learned how to do computer generated hologram. And it was fun. This was a really good way to get in touch with Fourier optics.
Since that time I have not done any hologram
I am enjoying reading your post on any holographic topics. It is so good to read about hologram enthusiasts.

[pdelong]

Hi everybody. I've been interested in holography for as long as I can remember. When I was in high-school, I was on vacation with my parents in Canada, and we went to an art museum in Ottawa that had a <i>huge</i> holography exhibit. From that moment on, I was hooked.

I didn't seriously consider the possibility that I could produce my own holograms until I found the Holography Handbook one day on a bookstore shelf. But I still lacked the resources to do so, being only in high-school or college (can't recall which).

It was not until I graduated college that I had the disposable income to start seriously making a foray into this hobby. I bought myself a 5 mW HeNe laser from Edmund Scientific, and built the sandbox isolation table in the basement of my apartment. However, I never found the time to use it because of the demands my job and life in-general placed on me. When I moved out of that apartment a couple years ago, I had to dismantle the whole setup before I had even produced my first hologram.

This most recent summer, however, I found Graham Saxby's book "Practical Holography" and started flipping through it. It's much better than the "Holography Handbook" because it seems to get you going using baby steps, rather than making a huge investment and doing it all at once. Once I found out about Integraf, I got the diode laser and some film and started working in-earnest. (Yeah, my HeNe laser is currently gathering dust, but I plan to start using it again once I get a spatial filter.)

I've finally made my first batch of holograms. They're a bit on the dim side, but I'm still encouraged by the results, and it has spurred me on.

Besides holography, I graduated from Rutgers as an electrical engineer, and I currently make a living as a systems administrator (though I'd rather be an optical engineer or a physics professor). For more personal info, see my LiveJournal, which there's a link to in my profile.

It's good to be here and to have so many brains to pick in one place.

[Grey]

Hello all, my name is Michael Reiser.

A little bit of history...

I became interested in Holography back in 1978 when a buddy told me that those neat ghosts in the Haunted House at Disneyland were holograms Anyway, even after I discovered the truth, I was still intrigued with the technology. The only problem back then was that Holography was far too cost prohibitive for me. So, I resigned to borrowing library books as often as I could get them, and reading about how much fun everyone else was having making holograms. I found the Holography Handbook in 1983, but, being in highschool, the art was still financially beyond my means (although I did do my senior paper on the Holographic Universe). Fast forward over 20 years later. Thanks to Google, I dicovered this forum, Holoworld.com, and Shoebox Holography. I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive in the mail (along with a copy of Practical Holography), but for the first time in my life I can actually partake in an activity I've only been able to dream about for so long. I'm so excited, I can hardly breathe!

Being just a beginner, I'm sure I'll be asking some silly questions (after searching, of course). All I ask is your patience

Thanks for the opportunity to join this community!

Michael