Last month I visited Ed Wesly in Chicago, to pick up his collection of vintage lasers and add it to mine. It's a group of 12, including those he got from Dr. Tung Jeong of Lake Forest College and many from the Zenith Corporation. We'd been putting the trip off for a few years because he wanted to get a hologram of the stack using the pulsed ruby laser from the old Anait Stevens Lab at Lake Forest, which had been in disrepair and needed to get up and running first.
We spent friday and saturday troubleshooting a trigger problem, sunday aligning the laser and setting up the shot, and on monday morning got some good results. The one below shows his stack of lasers in the studio. The laser was a Lumonics (JK) model from the late '80s, he used Agfa 8E75HD film from the late '90s, and both worked fine! We did a few with each of us in the scene too, but mine's too dim to get a good picture easily. His is very good. After the shots were done, the stack was humped quickly into the truck to join a whale of a Plasma Kinetics copper vapor laser for the trip to Arizona. The second pic shows the shelf of old lasers where the hologram now resides and where I took the pic of it.
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