Making Conventional Denisyuk, Transmission and Reflection Holograms in the Studio

Following the ground‐breaking work by Denisyuk in the USSR and Upatnieks and Leith in the USA in the 1960s which inaugurated “off‐axis” recording simultaneously in the East and the West, typical general configurations for recording the various types of hologram have established themselves. This chapter explains these types. In the early work by Denis Gabor and others, where it was necessary to have the “reference” and “object” beams almost coaxial, the shadow of a transparent object (for example, a slide) was featured in the “reference beam” profile, with deleterious effects on image quality, but the methods of Denisyuk and Leith, regarded as being invented simultaneously on separate continents, broke through this barrier. The chapter also discusses the basic configuration for the Denisyuk method. Some basic conventional generic methods are developed for producing transmission and reflection holograms that each individual user tends to personalise to their own specific needs; and the chapter details these methods.