PSU Magazine Spring 2004

t:l ts not often a fan can tell you the moment she went around the bend, but Diane Rulien '86 remembers it well. "I brought home the photos l'd taken, mounted them," she says, "and I was hooked." Obviously, these weren't just any snapshots. Rulien was seeing her photos in pseudo 3-D. Her instant infatuation with the eerie images has altered the course of her life. At the time, the serious, sensi– ble single mother had just launched her law practice. But when she saw that first image melt into virtual 3-D, Rulien started down an intriguing path. Now she's head of the first 3-D gallery and museum in the United States, chair of the 2004 convention of the ational Stereoscopic Association, and all– around stereoscopy enthusiast. About stereo photography, she says good-humoredly, shes batty. (Duman eyes are set a couple of inches apart, so each eye sees things from a slightly different angle. Hold your hand a few inches from your nose, look at it with just your right eye, then with just your left. The shift you notice is the key to seeing in three dimensions. 18 PSU MAGAZINE SPRING 2004 Your brain merges the two images and uses the gap to measure distance. Without that little shift, you'd find it tricky to tell the distance from Point A to Point B-or anywhere else, for that matter. Stereoscopic photography is based on the same principle. Two pho– tographs are taken from about two inches apart-the same distance apart as a pair of eyes. Seen through a special viewer, the photographs create one, seemingly three-dimensional image, but perhaps because the photos are actually flat , the 3-D has a strange, dreamlike quality. l;ttereo photography has been around almost since the earliest days of photography. And when stereo daguerreotypes were exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, a craze was born. Stereo photography became the tele– vision or its day. Within three years, 500,000 stereoscopic viewers were in European homes. Between about 1860 and 1920, most American homes had a stereo-viewer. Teams of photogra– phers were sent out to canvass and document the world in stereo. Overall, an estimated five million stereoscopic photographs circulated. The craze may be over, but aficiona– dos continue to practice the art. And anyone with a camera and a steady hand can create a stereo photograph. "You put your weight on one foot LO take the rirst photograph, then shifr your weight to the other foot and take the second one," Rulien says. "We call it the cha-cha." It's a budget solution, but devotees have been known to drop $4,000 on a We may see a hammerhead shark– effect, but Diane Rulien sees in 3-D using this viewer created by artist David Lee. top-of-the-line, two-lens German cam– era. Other options include "twinning," using two cameras mounted side by side. Or a "slide bar," which accommo– dates a regular camera. After you take the first photo, you slide the camera down the bar to take the second photo. lt'.s similar to the cha-cha technique. The result? Mysterious stereo pho– tographs that seem to produce an almost magical effect on adherents. Rulien , for instance, innocently calls it "my hobby." Some hobby. Last September, she flew to Los Angeles for a 12-day festival or 3-D movies. She saw three movies a day