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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…