New VR Photography Book Teaches How to Create Interactive Panoramas

Scott Highton is a San Francisco-based photojournalist and documentary filmmaker whose credits include over 60 productions for PBS, Discovery Channel, Arts & Entertainment, Turner Broadcasting and the National Audubon Society.

He has also helped pioneer the field of virtual reality photography. You've seen VR photographs on the Web if you've ever encountered an interactive 360-degree panoramic image, where you can "navigate" the scene by dragging and clicking, so that you appear to move left and right, up and down, and closer and further away. VR photography is also used online for giving the appearance of spinning an object around, with your cursor or keyboard, to observe it from all angles and perspectives.

Highton's now published the definitive volume on "Virtual Reality Photography," so that multimedia journalists can learn the required techniques for creating state-of-the-art VR images for themselves. It's amply illustrated in full-color throughout, with tips, techniques, and detailed instruction.

In four sections it covers photography basics, panoramic VR imaging, object VR imaging, and "how to run an effective business offering professional VR photography services, based on the author's 30+ years of experience."

Watch Scott Highton lecture on VR photography here (74-minute video).

See examples of VR photography here and here.

For more info on the book (including sample chapters), or to order, go here.

How Can Still Photogs Expand Their Multimedia Skills?

Will Yurman is a newspaper staff photographer who, like many of his confreres, has had to add an abundance of multimedia skill sets to his repertoire -- audio gathering and editing, slideshow production, video shooting and editing, even constructing interactive 360-degree panoramic images.

Online journalism professor Mindy McAdams conducted an insightful interview with him for her excellent blog. The Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle visual journalist expounded on the differences between shooting stills and video, and emphasized the importance of audio in multimedia stories. Read it here.

McAdams previously talked to photo editors and multimedia producers at four newspapers to find out what skill sets are in short supply in today's newsrooms. "Video editing, storytelling and audio skills led the list." Read it here.

On KobreGuide, be sure to see Yurman's work and read our interview with him.

1,474-Megapixel Inaugural Photo - WOW!

How do you fit two million people in one photograph?

David Bergman found the solution, for his picture of President Obama's inauguration, and you've got to see it to believe it:

Before Tuesday, I had photographed five presidents and covered big events including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and concerts like Live 8 and Live Earth. But this one was the biggest.

It deserved a big photo.

And big it is. It's an interactive panoramic shot, composed of hundreds of smaller images, so you can zoom in, out, over, under, around, through an historic sea of faces -- and get so close to individuals, famous and obscure, that you can see the whites of their eyes. (Hey, there's Yo-Yo Ma, taking a picture with his iPhone!)

Clearly something you won't find in the print edition of your newspaper.

So how did Bergman accomplish this?

I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform . The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Use the controls to zoom and pan around the photo. You can also double click to zoom in and double click again to get even closer.

Compare it to CNN's 3D Photosynth project.

They're both like "Where's Waldo?" with real people -- and no Waldo. (Or at least we haven't found him yet.)