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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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.
Read more Wonder
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 Perhaps just a strange type of erosion based on the different materials that originally made up the rock?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?
Read more Seeing Color in Rocks
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?
Read more Backlit Leaf
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.
Read more VR Photography and Seeing More of the World Around Us
For the most part, this blog is mainly focused on my Virtual Reality (VR) photography. When I started it, VR photography was still fairly uncommon. That’s no longer the case as VRs are commonly used in advertising and gaming, Google uses them in Street View, smartphone apps make it easy to take and view them, and experiences are becoming richer with fully-immersive headsets. Even so, there still seems to be a place for them in the art of photography, and I still enjoy the process of making them.
I like to apply this to waterfalls in particular, because doing so reveals other scenic things. As beautiful as most waterfalls are, they’re often located in surroundings that are also striking. Lush canyons, austere cliff faces, bubbling brooks, and so on. When we take a single still picture, the surroundings are rarely included. By taking a VR, other elements become visible. It’s as if you are there, and can look around and appreciate the whole environment.
VRs capture a more complete, and in some ways more honest representation of a scene. This has been pointed out in journalism, for example. When taking a standard picture, simply framing the shot is an editorial decision. What to include versus what to leave out influences how the viewer responds, what they learn or perceive, etc. This sort of thing can have profound influence on how one interprets a scene.
In addition to the photographic aspect, continuing to work with them has developed my understanding of VR photography as a metaphor, revealing new ways they show how we think about the world around us. Read more
Paths of Life
A VR of paths… Based on my WWP “Paths” entry, this version is modified as I experiment with illustrating concepts and not just places. Read more
VR Photography as Metaphor
Virtual reality photography has been around a while, but is becoming more widely known as new ways emerge of experiencing media. In particular, people expect rich ways of exploring remote locations, and the emergence of touch-sensitive displays makes VR pictures very compelling. In addition to photographic value, they offer an intriguing metaphor for seeing things in the real world — for understanding our whole reality.
VR photographs are viewed interactively. They are images that show all fields of view available from a given location. Three hundred sixty degrees around, and one hundred eighty degrees vertically, the viewer is essentially inside a sphere with the ability to look in any direction and often to zoom in for greater detail.
What can this tell us about the nature of reality? Read more