Van Gogh Self Portrait and Irises
Hello Friends,

We've been in the Netherlands since August 18, 3 more days to go, and then home. Yesterday, as I suspect you can guess, we went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I apologize to art purists for today's images. In some ways providing them should be considered immoral if not illegal, but they've long ago fallen into the public domain, and I asked if it was allowed to photograph paintings in the museum. I was told yes, just not with flash, and it seemed almost everyone at the museum was taking shots of their favorite Van Gogh paintings with their cellphones.

While these conversions from 2-D to 3-D are far from perfect, it was ridiculously easy to do so. Our dear friend Masuji Suto years ago provided us with StereoPhoto Maker, which has become a free, widely used tool by 3-D photo enthusiasts for producing high quality 3-D images from 2 images (one for the left eye, one for the right). Not stopping there Masuji created 3D Steroid Pro as a cheap cellphone app, and more recently DepthMaker, a cellphone app that converts 2-D images into 3-D. DepthMaker is certainly not perfect or as good as a professional human conversion, but it's great fun and does a very nice job of using depth cues in 2-D shots to turn them into very nice 3-D images.

Today's images were cellphone shots of two of Van Gogh's iconic images, which I shot with my Google Pixel 9 Pro cellphone, cropped, converted into 3-D from 2-D with DepthMaker, modified a bit a with StereoPhoto Maker, and cleaned up a bit more in Photoshop. I think you'll be amazed if not appauled with the results.

Holland's in general and Amsterdam in particular have provided us great eye-opening experiences. Yesterday we went on a VR (virtual reality) Canal Cruise (https://www.vrvoyage.nl), which sounds hoaky, I know, but was really cool. It was an actual 75 minute canal boat tour, 15 minutes of which we would don VR headsets and see how things looked in the 17th century, ... buildings, ships, people, dogs, pigs, etc. I'd strongly recommend it.

One of the most interesting parts of the cruise was narration that described Holland in the 17th century and perhaps even today as a place where men and women (and perhaps non-whites) of all religions could come, live, work, practice commerce and religions in a climate of live-and-let-live tolerance that our country, the United States, has long professed to but these days is coming up sadly short. I can't say that I've looked into how that's holding up in the Netherlands today, but I'd invite my Dutch friends to please comment.

Speaking of VR tours, the day before yesterday we did a virtual tour of the Anne Frank house at 9:30am, followed by an actual tour of the house at 12:30pm. Be sure to book well in advance the actual tour if you're coming here. The VR tour was a great prelude to the actual tour in that the VR tour showed furnishings of the "secret annex", while the actual tour did not, the rooms were bare (at the direction of Otto Frank, Anne's father, who survived). The two tours one after the other provided an extremely moving experience.

Wishing you well, hoping to get home without any difficulties upon re-entry,

Barry Rothstein

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