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”.
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.
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.
This picture of a flower was inspired by another photographer’s work, and I tried this as a learning exercise, and like the way it turned out.
The original picture was color, and although the flower itself was mostly white, there were some other shades such as yellow and green. Also, the background was cluttered, mostly green with some brown branches.
This is a moderately close up picture of a rock in the yard down the street. It caught my eye a while ago because of the unusual nature of the holes in the rock.
It doesn’t quite look volcanic. Maybe it’s coral? But it doesn’t look like any that I’ve seen before. Perhaps just a strange type of erosion based on the different materials that originally made up the rock? But the holes don’t look like the kind of shapes that usually result from mixing.
So it’s a mystery, at least to me. What should we make of such things?
This is an abstract picture of clouds, processed to bring out how it made me feel, what I saw in the original scene. In the process of making this, new ideas came to mind, and I further processed it to enhance them. The process was like a conversation with myself.
The result was interesting, and I allude to some of the things I was thinking in the text that accompanied the post on social media:
Abstract. A line of trees being blown by the wind? Something else?
The thing is, I’m pretty sure that some people, or even most, don’t see it the same way I do. They may not see the things I saw, and they may also see other things. Those views are entirely valid, in my opinion.
On this site, I will use the term “spherical photography” to refer to pictures that capture the photographer’s view in every direction – 360 degrees around, and 180 degrees up and down. In other words, the image is a complete sphere with the photographer (or camera) at the center.
They are typically viewed in a web browser or mobile app with the viewer panning the view around the picture to see the whole thing.
Google Street View may be the best known example, but they are also commonly used for viewing real estate and hotel rooms and playing some computer games.
Unfortunately, a variety of other terms are also used to describe the images, including photo spheres (Google), 360 panoramas, 360 photographs, virtual reality (VR) panoramas, VR photos, 360 images, interactive panoramas, and immersive panoramas. Various other combinations of the terms are occasionally used, but these are the most common.
I’m less interested in the immersive, virtual reality, or interactive aspects of the images, even though they are certainly involved. Those evoke the way the image is experienced rather than the image itself, and I want to explore alternate ways of experiencing them.
Also, the term “panorama” seems confusing to some people because it generally evokes a wide photograph, typically used for landscape photography. However, even though these pictures are as wide as one can get, they are generally viewed in an aspect ratio that matches typical photographs.
One of the things I hope to explore on this site is the relationship between spherical and flat (planar) photography, which is a little different than creating a “you are there” experience.
So, given the observations above, my particular interests, and the fact that there is no single standard name, I decided to use “spherical photograph”.
Here’s a possible example of seeing more of what’s there. In this case, colors in a simple field of rocks. What do we see? What’s really there?
This simple picture of a leaf is interesting, I think, because of the way the backlighting makes the leaf stand out from the background and gives it a richer, deeper color. There’s something about this sort of lighting, perhaps similar to stained glass windows, that we find visually appealing.
It takes two separate elements coming together to make this effect, and I think the combination illustrates a subtle aspect about our minds, especially the nature of consciousness.
After allowing this site to go mostly inactive for the last few years, I hope to renew it with a clearer vision. Long-term, I will probably rebuild it from scratch, but in the meantime, hope to use the current version to work out the vision, do some experiments, and share some photography. As a start, here’s a description of the initial path.
Whole Reality is an exploration of the art and craft of spherical photography* and its use to convey ideas and emotion. This is common with some types of standard photography such as fine art, abstract, and so on, but is much less common with spherical photos.
Instead, spherical photos are normally used to provide viewers with a “you are there” experience by allowing them to look around a scene in any direction. Examples include Google StreetView, showing real estate or hotel rooms, and making immersive games. These applications are useful and fun, but still leave plenty of room for new artistic expressions.
As a result, there’s an opportunity for new thinking to develop this capability.