This is a picture from a recently posted 360 photo of Majestic Falls. The original picture was for one of my World Wide Panorama projects, and talked about the waterfall in general. I used a different picture of this same waterfall to discuss the idea of qualia; that one was just a normal photograph. The…
This is Majestic Falls, the main waterfall at McDowell Creek Falls county park.
When photographs are printed and hung on a wall, they often have a frame and a matte. Sometimes though, photographers, like other visual artists, choose to display their pictures without a frame – so-called “frameless” mounting. The picture here is an example of that. This example does have a solid side, but sometimes frameless mounts…
This is the Eagle Marsh lookout at the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge .
For a recent 360 photography project, I took a VR photograph inside of an old, water-powered mill that has been turned into a state park: Thompson’s Mills in Shedd, Oregon. The purpose was to make a picture for the Worldwide Panorama Project quarterly theme of “Museums”. The picture here is a “little planet” view of…
In the previous essay, I discussed the possibility that the brain is necessary to consciousness, but that it is not sufficient. In other words, there seems to be something needed beyond just material structures. We explored these ideas by considering the metaphor of a stained glass window, illustrating the possibility that we need to continue…
Previously I have written about how spherical photography can be a metaphor for looking around, and how it illustrates the value of doing so. There is no comparable way to change the view in standard photography, of course. However, we can still choose what part of a photograph to focus on. Generally, however, our eyes…
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…
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,…
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.