mbanas's blog

A question that is almost never asked, and much more rarely discussed, is how to "frame" a 360x180 panoramic photo. (Naturally, if you have less than a full sphere, you *do* have to make framing decisions on what to keep in the shot and what to exclude, but that's not the quandary here.) I've been thinking about this lately in the context of improving my photographic skills.

A little background first: I'm a 3D artist and retoucher, and nothing even close to a professional photographer. Therefore, my thoughts on the subject are going to be a little different from most, but we each come from somewhere, right? In any case, because I am definitely not a "pro shooter" I struggle with things like composition and lighting in my "framed" regular photos (and, boy, do I use my Photoshop skills afterwards), but lighting, and the "quality" of light, are almost the same in a 360x180 pano as they are in a single frame photo. It is the composition of the shot, or the "framing," that I'm wondering about now.

Hey Folks, I recently got back from SIGGRAPH, the Association of Computing Machinery's annual blowout convention for the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Graphics. (Heh heh... SIG-GRAPH, get it?) I'm sure that kind of description makes it sound like the most fun you can have on two legs, right? Actually, it is a great convention for all kinds of people, not just graphics programmers and visual nerds (although they have plenty to do at SIGGRAPH as well). About 20,000 people attended this year, and there were over 100 companies showing their wares on the Expo floor, and lots of great advances in computer graphics were discussed and revealed.