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16
Jun

Viewing Spherical Photos as Cylinders

Previously, I described an alternative way to represent pointers to spherical photos. Usually they are static online pictures, which works since a hyperlink can then send the viewer to the full, interactive picture. However, another possibility is to make the pointer a physical picture, printed out and maybe even hung on the wall.

The same thing can be done with the spherical picture itself. Ideally, the pictures represent the inside of a sphere, the view one gets when looking around. However, it can be printed on the outside of a sphere, and the experience of viewing it still more or less works.

Such spheres have been made, and it’s possible to order something very near from companies who will print them on pieces that snap together. Also, some people have experimented with mapping the picture to the outside of a cube, which gives six fixed views. That’s obviously less interactive, but still gives some idea.

In many spherical pictures, though, the top and bottom are not interesting. These represent looking up and down. A spherical picture taken outside while standing on cement, for example, would just have sky above and gray below – not very interesting.

This leads to another possibility: removing the top and bottom, straightening the sides, and making a cylinder by printing it on the outside.

Viewing a cylinder just means rotating it so that the area of interest is seen. Seems like this should work naturally.

A small cylinder could be the size of a Christmas ornament, while a larger one could sit on some sort of stand. On a stand, the viewer could easily turn it, approximating the experience of panning left or right in a regular online spherical photo. In addition, the stand could be motorized so that the cylinder moves on its own, just like online versions sometimes automatically pan around.

Going even further, the user could interact with the motorized system to be gently directed to certain views. There are more options for placing lighting inside the cylinder, coupling cylinders, generating the view dynamically from a projector instead of printed, and so on.

It seems like this approach has a lot of interesting possibilities, and I may end up building some to check them out.

31
May

Seeing With Awareness

I took this picture recently while on a photo walk. During the walk, I was intentionally open to new perspectives, so it’s easier to notice things that I would normally miss.

In this case, it seemed like the box appeared to be a face. Now, this box is in our front yard and I’ve probably looked at it hundreds of times without noticing that. But with an open mind, the association jumped out.

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26
May

New Ways to Engage With Spherical Photos

In an earlier essay, I talked about the different pieces of a spherical photograph experience. Here, I want to look at the static introduction image piece a little more closely.

Spherical photos are inherently interactive because humans cannot see an entire sphere at one time without severely distorting the image. Before interacting with the image, people often encounter a representation of it that is static. This is often a thumbnail image of one portion of the whole sphere. Occasionally, it may be most or all of the sphere as a highly distorted image.*

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17
May

Another Way to Focus

I recently took a picture of some plants that had interesting leaves. The picture had a calm aspect, the details on the leaves looking almost fuzzy. A little later, I reprocessed it to be black and white. The result gave a different feel to the picture. With the green color removed, the unusually shaped leaves and almost spiky texture jumped out.

Here are the two versions:

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10
May

Not A Photograph

This picture started out as a photograph of a crack in the street. The shape reminded me of a lightning bolt, so as an exercise, I processed it in Photoshop to enhance that freeling. Carefully cropped it, inverted it so the black crack became white, and so on.

The result is a little abstract, but I think gets the idea across of a lightning bolt striking in a field.

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5
May

Spherical Photography as Metaphor

Spherical photographs provide rich ways of exploring remote locations and giving a “you are there” experience. But in addition to photographic value, they also offer an interesting metaphor for seeing our world more clearly.

To understand how the metaphor might work, consider the following illustration.

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3
May

Conversing With Photography

A couple years ago, I developed a photography project called “Isolations”. The idea was to make a series of pictures, typically close-up, of things isolated from their surroundings. The most common technique was to blur the backgrounds, but dimming it, desaturating, and so on, are all reasonable possibilities.

One of those pictures wasn’t quite that simple, in that there were a series of items that moved progressively out of focus, while the main subject was clear. I took the picture casually, not thinking it was a great example of what I was looking for, but interested in what was there, what might be made of it.

Here is the picture:

Looking at it later, the weeds seemed to be playing “follow the leader”, and this led me to think of how this was a picture of leadership. It was a positive metaphor in that the leader was involved, in the front, blazing the trail, rather than in the rear telling other people to do all the work. On the other hand, it was also a picture of leaders who are “prickly”, who may be difficult to work for, abrasive to the people they are leading, and so on. Both worked, it just depended on what one wanted to bring out.

It was interesting to me that these concepts were not in mind when taking the picture, but really jumped out afterward. I actually learned some things about leadership and how to think about it. The process led me to think about what other things could be pictured as part of a photography project.

This back and forth sequence was like a conversation between myself and my photographic activities. Seems like an interesting idea – to use photography itself as a way to think through things. Even if a good picture does not result, there would be value in the process just like with any other conversation. In fact, might this be a comment on the artistic process in general?

26
Apr

Perspective

How we look at something affects what we think about it. We don’t necessarily see truth without some effort; we need to determine if our perspective is correct.

As a quick exploration of this, I took these pictures:

They were posted on Instagram with the left one visible first with a description that said it looks “like a little green campfire of a plant reaching to the sky”.

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19
Apr

Floating Focus

In this picture of a small flower, I modified the background after taking the picture in order to highlight the flower and to separate it from the grass below it. Mainly, the grass was blurred a lot and made darker.

I like the way it worked out – the flower seems to float above the grass and is definitely the thing that grabs your attention. The background fades away even though it is a lot of the image.

However, it occurred to me to wonder what was being ignored in the grass. Surprising plant shapes, some interesting bugs, textures on leaves or the dirt, and so on.

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14
Apr

Parts of the Spherical Photograph Experience

Given the nature of spherical photographs as encompassing a complete view of a scene, one result of this is that they are, by nature, interactive. Humans have a limited field of view and trying to present all of a spherical view in a way that can be seen all at once is only possibly by severely distorting the picture. So the only way for a person to see the whole thing is to interact with it, to look at only a part of it at a time.

For my purposes, it turns out to be useful to describe the different aspects of this experience.

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