All in perspective

Katie Romanko is a 19-year-old senior in broadcast journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. She was selected as the artist for this year's Biggest Little Best of Northern Nevada after one of her professors posted some examples of her work with anaglyphs (images that create a 3-D image using red and blue glasses) on Facebook.

How did you come to learn the 3-D imaging process?

I took Howard Goldbaum's photojournalism class at the Reynold's School of Journalism. We just learned pretty basic photography, but for an extra credit assignment, you could do 3-D. He taught us how to do it mid-semester. When I realized I wanted the extra credit, I decided to do 3-D. It was actually relatively easy, in comparison to other possibilities for extra credit. So I went and took a picture of the Mackay statue. It was on campus, and I thought it would look great in 3-D. It happened to work out really well, and I started to teach other students how to do it as well. And then he recommended me for this job.

How do you make the images appear 3-D?

You really don't need two cameras, you can use one, but if you're doing action shots, you need to have two cameras because they both need to fire simultaneously. Basically, you need to have two shots that are about an inch and a half to five inches apart. And then you take those two shots, naming them left and right, and process them through a Photoshop process, and it ends up being 3-D.

What was surprising about doing the Best Of for us?

It was a lot more work than I thought it would be. When I first got the job, I was all, “Oh it'll be over, and I'll get this all done in a couple of weeks.” That wasn't the case, but I got real world experience, which was good, and I think all the work will pay off once I see it, when it looks professional and it looks clean.

Oh, it’s beautiful on the screen, but we’re not going to know what it looks like on newsprint until we see it on newsprint. So what makes for a good 3-D shot? Will anything work, or how do you pick one?

It's really crucial to have a good foreground and a good background. Having objects stick out toward you is really great because technically when you look at an object that's coming out toward you, in a normal photograph, it almost looks 3-D. Putting the 3-D imaging on top of it makes it look even more three dimensional.

Were there any issues that came about while doing our Best Of?

There were many … not really problem problems, but I just had to reshoot some of the pictures because they didn't work out. One of the biggest problems was you can't really shoot a dark picture because it doesn't come out well in 3-D with all the colors. It was challenging because some of the categories we wanted to shoot dark, like to represent nightlife and casino, and those didn't work out too well.