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3-D photos are this alumna's passion and part-time job.

It's 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 I'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, sensible 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 National Stereoscopic Association, and all-around stereoscopy enthusiast.

About stereo photography, she says good-humoredly, she's batty.

Human 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.

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 photographs are taken from about two inches apartthe 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.

Stereo 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 television of 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 photographers 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 aficionados 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 to take the first photograph, then shift 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 top-of-the-line, two-lens German camera. Other options include "twinning," using two cameras mounted side by side. Or a "slide bar," which accommodates a regular camera. After you take the first photo, you slide the camera down the bar to take the second photo. It's similar to the cha-cha technique.

The result? Mysterious stereo photographs 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 of 3-D movies. She saw three movies a day and on two days she saw five movies. This July, when the National Stereoscopic Association holds its 2004 convention in Portland, Rulien will be serving as chair.

And she's a driving force behind the 3-D Center of Art & Photography, which the Cascade Stereoscopic Club opened in February in trendy Northwest Portland.

Rulien is director of the center, newsletter editor, chief counsel, and on the board of directors. Within the 80-member club, she acknowledges, "I'm definitely the nutso."

It's been a nutty journey.

After Rulien graduated from Milwaukie High School in 1967, she entered Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. But after two years, she dropped out, married, moved to Seattle, and had a daughter. When the family returned to Portland in 1977, Rulien needed a job.

"I didn't have a college education," she says, "and I needed some sort of work that paid well and had benefits." The Greyhound bus company was it. "There were only two women drivers in Oregon at the time—and only because the company was compelled to hire women," she says. "Ninety percent of the drivers were great. A few weren't."

As a new hire, Rulien worked "the extra board"—filling in at the last minute for drivers on vacations, taking sick days, and such. "You never knew ahead of time which routes you'd be on," she says. "I'd drop my daughter off with friends or my parents and I might be back in four hours or I might be back in three days."

Rulien enjoyed the job, and even found time to serve a year as the president of the Portland chapter of the National Organization for Women. But she wanted more. Now single, she decided to return to college. This time things were different. Very different.

"I went to Pacific Lutheran at a time when girls had a 10 p.m. curfew and students had to go to chapel every day," says Rulien. Almost 15 years later, PSU was "a vibrant combination of nationalities and ages—so much was going on. I used to love to stand in front of the bulletin board and just look at everything there was you could do."

Rulien followed a lifelong interest and majored in history with a minor in women's studies. "I was a product of the '60s," she says, "and very into the idea of equality for blacks and women." But it was a class in constitutional history that set Rulien on her next career path.

"We read Supreme Court cases and then discussed them in class," she says. "I loved that course." Rulien decided to enter law school.

"Law school," she says, "was terrifying. The pressure, the rumors, the fear."

Rulien took an average of five classes a term, reading 80 to 200 pages of homework every day. And none of her classes had any graded work until the final exam. "In every class," she says, "the final exam consists of two essay questions. You read, analyze—if you miss the point of the questions, that's the end. There's no makeup exam."

After earning a JD in 1990 from Lewis & Clark College, Rulien started her own practice and soon danced the cha-cha that changed her life. Fast-forward a dozen or so years to a modest storefront on Northwest Lovejoy Street and the culmination of a years-long dream: the 3D Center of Art & Photography.

The center features a display of antiques, including a wooden box camera that shoots in stereo, early 1900s stereo-viewers, stereo cards, and even a View Master display featuring a collection of hundreds of reels of Chinese art in View Master format.

Elsewhere is an uncanny lenticular photograph and the four-lens camera used to create it. Lenticular photography gives photos an almost holographic look. If you've seen a small card featuring a man or woman whose eyes seem to follow you, chances are you've seen a lenticular photo.

In the art gallery area, the club plans to rotate contemporary art. The gallery's first exhibit featured work by David Lee, a California artist whose specialty is to recreate Ansel Adams photographs in 8-by-10 stereoscopic view.

The gallery provides special viewing equipment for visitors, but Rulien, like many experienced stereo photography viewers, can "free view," that is view the photos without goggles or viewers and see them magically pop into 3-D.

Currently open afternoons Fridays through Sundays, the center plans to add workshops in all things stereo-photographic. Which means, of course, that soon others, too, may dance a life-changing cha-cha.

(Melissa Steineger, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the article "Aquatic Invaders" for the winter 2004 PSU Magazine.)