#spaceoftheweek

Bradford Bohonus is a veritable master of 360 panoramic photography that has been shooting virtual tours of Seattle and its surrounding areas for close to two decades. Since Bohonus pretty much started VR photography when VR was first being developed, we sat down with him to learn more about the arc of his career.

In the time that you’ve been doing what has changed from when you started to today?

I started making interactive panoramas as a hobby, after learning of Apple's Quicktime VR in 1996. I thought it was a great activity that combined my technical and creative interests.

There have been many changes along the way. Going from film to digital was of course the first big one. My earliest Quicktime VR panoramas were made from scanned 4x5 prints scanned on a flatbed scanner, after that I shot slide film.

Then the first affordable DSLRs appearing on the market, along with the change from cylindrical panoramas to full spherical panoramas. Followed by improvements in stitching software (Apple's early Quicktime VR was produced using command-line tools via Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) software).

Then there was the troubling discontinuation of Quicktime VR support by Apple. Fortunately new viewers using Flash and Java stepped up to fill that gap!

And lastly, I like to think that I have become a better photographer over the years.

You are pretty prolific as a panoramic photographer. I dare say you’re covering the streets of Seattle better than Google Maps. Why?

Well there is Google's Street View of course, which has Seattle covered. But an automatically captured view is not the same as one chosen specifically, and photographically.

Yes, thousands of Seattle panoramas can be found at my website (www.bohonus.com). Like any undertaking, this type of photography requires practice. In doing so, I shoot panoramas of where I live. I may shoot the same corner during spring, summer, at night, during sunset, in fog, or if something changes (buildings being built or torn down etc). There have been many changes to Seattle over the years, and I have documented them along the way as a result of my practice. I shoot constantly. Regardless if it is for client work or for my own personal exploration, I strive always to improve my techniques, my "eye" and my work as a whole.

And as a bonus, I've gotten to know the city's various nooks and crannies very well!

Do you have any stories from the streets of Seattle to share?

Probably the most memorable incident was when I was out shooting on one of Seattle's rare days with significant snow.

I had my tripod set up on a street corner and just as I was getting ready to shoot, a large charter bus started to turn down the very steep and icy street in front of me. Myself and another person who was walking by with their dog attempted to get the driver's attention waving our arms and yelling "no! don't go down this street!" but it was not enough. The bus turned down the street and then began sliding, right to the end- where it then smashed through a concrete barrier/guard rail and hung 30+ feet over a freeway. And then, a *second* bus right behind the first one did the exact same thing. It too began to slide down the icy street. It hit the first bus at the bottom pushing it even further out over the freeway, and then to the side where it also smashed into the protective barrier.

I grabbed my camera and proceeded to get to the bottom of the street where I could see passengers of both busses piling out of the emergency exits (windows) onto the snow covered street. Fortunately there were only a few very minor injuries.

With everyone safely out of the busses, I shot two panoramas of the scene.

Photos and news coverage of the unusual accident were seen around the world.

Do you have any tips for newcomers?

Shoot a lot, shoot what interests you, and look to learn and improve along the way. Consider how your images may be of use in the future, even it's just for historical documentation. There aren't nearly as many vr photographers as there are regular still photographers. Because of that, very often a panorama taken of a particular corner or of a particular place will be the first capture of its kind of that corner or place (and may even remain the only one). So keep everything too!

Thank you so much for sharing your time with us for this interview, Bradford!  Shooting thousands of panoramas in Seattle can keep you busy but we really ♥︎ your work and for your generosity in sharing some images here with us.

With Halloween and the Day of the Dead just around the corner, we put together this collection of “Final Destinations” posted on Roundme for all you tombstone tourists!

1) The Jewell Cemetery (above) in Columbia Missouri photographed by DrJaySinful features the sarcophagus of William Jewell.  According to Columbia Paranormal, the cemetery is supposedly haunted by the spirit of his wife Mrs. Jewell, who left her husband and ran off with a slave in the 1800s.

2) Igors Jefimovs devoted an entire series of panoramas in Latvia to a space he calls “Cemeteries” and describes it as “creepy”. Dalbe Lutheran church and cemetery (above) is the one we thought was the creepiest!

3) The Tomb of Marie Laveau (above), the infamous Louisiana Voodoo Queen, was photographed by Brandon Ore and is located in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans. Some tourists visit and draw “X” marks in accordance with a decades-old rumor that if people wanted Laveau to grant them a wish, they had to draw an “X” on the tomb, turn around three times, knock on the tomb, yell out their wish, and if it was granted, come back, circle their “X,” and leave Laveau an offering.

4) Another spooky cemetery by Brandon Orr is that of the Contessa Entellina, a benevolent society with the largest tombs in Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans. Formed on September 8, 1886 for immigrants from Contessa Entellina, Sicily, it was originally named, “la Societa Italiana de Beneficenza Contessa Entillina”.

"L'heure bleue” is a French colloquialism that refers to that magical quality of light at dusk or dawn when the sky’s luminosity is considered to be the most wonderfully photogenic.  Brandon Ore exquisitely captured l’heure bleue in this week’s Space of the Week entitled "The Blue Hour" on Canal Street -- the main street separating the French Quarter from the Central Business District in New Orleans.

  Ore started taking panoramas almost exactly a year ago to the day we interviewed him, on October 14, 2013, when he uploaded his first photosphere to Google Views using a Canon T3i and the 18-55 kit lens.

  Today, having shot over 1,173 panos he’s unstoppable.  He uses a 360Precision Atome pano head and a Sigma 8mm lens on a Canon 5D Mk III.  Ore says he’s a hobbyist or in his words a “weekend warrior” panoramist with no formal training in photography and he attributes almost everything he knows about panography from Florian Knorn’s YouTube videos.

  We asked Ore how he obtained this shot and here’s what he said: “This image is half-luck, half-planned out.  There’s almost no spot on Canal Street that I don’t find photogenic and I wanted to take an image of the Walgreen’s there – it’s old and popular.  I had seen a lot of photos of that location that were great but I have not yet seen a panorama. But before I took the panorama, I scouted it out. I walked around the area and thought to myself “If I took a panorama here, what’s it going to look like with the Walgreen’s, the streetcar stop and the rest of the street?” Once I determined the spot I wanted to stand in, then I set up my camera. And here’s where the luck part came in: because as soon as I had everything in place, that’s when this street car arrived.  Now if you look at the image, traffic is stopped for the red light, which is really rare on Canal Street, especially on a Friday night when it’s usually jam packed with cars and it's even more of an occurrence that traffic was stopped at every traffic light at that intersection, not just the one I was standing next to. Then I shot 4+N in RAW and that was it.”

  But it looks like it was shot HDR.

  Nope. It’s a single exposure. Maybe it has that HDR quality in the way I process it in Adobe Camera RAW.  

  Can you tell us about how you worked the image?

  Well, after I fix the chromatic aberration, there’s a button that says “Auto”. So I’ll check out the auto settings and get a very rough optimization of exposure, white balance, highlights and shadows. But from there you have to tweak the settings manually to get the images to sync properly before stitching. And you can tweak it from the “Tone Curve” panel in ACR by using the sliders. Sometimes I grab the curve on the histogram but mostly I just eyeball it. I try to lift the shadows – all the darkness in the image – that’s the area I’m focusing on. Once I’ve got that, then I work on the highlights.  Then I click on the “Clarity” adjustment in ACR – and what that does is it sharpens up the image but it also takes a lot of the saturation out. That’s a situation where you just have to play around with it because I have found there is really not one combination that fits all pictures.  I have a defined workflow, but when it comes to values, each picture has its own recipe. So then when I have it just right – just the way I like it – then I go with it and I sync it. And that’s how I get that HDR look. Now I have shot exposure bracketing the traditional way and in those instances, I’ll let PTGui handle the exposure fusion.

Technically, the “Blue Hour Image” is really pretty, but emotionally the “Shrine to St. Roch” is pretty impactful. We really love it.

  “There are many shrines like that in New Orleans that are hidden and that people don’t know about. The Shrine to St. Roch is particularly historic but I’m not going to bore you with the history.”

  Please try to bore us! We’d love a history lesson!

  “Well, in 1867 the yellow fever was a epidemic in New Orleans. Rev. Peter Leonard Thevis was a German priest who turned to Saint Roch, the patron of good health. Thevis promised that if no one in the parish died from the epidemic, he would build a chapel in honor of St. Roch.  Apparently nobody from the Holy Trinity parish died from the fever in either the epidemic of 1867 or the one in 1878.  So Thevis fulfilled his promise and built this shrine.  It was severely damaged when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.”

  But like we said, this space hit us on an emotional level. What was it like to shoot it?

  “The shrine is located in a little unassuming room. I mean it’s literally about the size of a broom closet. I barely had enough room for me and the tripod to fit.  And in that shrine, people leave behind mementoes and tokens of gratitude to St. Roch for having had a miraculous healing from all sorts of afflictions. I mean they leave things like prosthetics, glass eyeballs, and crutches as a testament to being healed by the power of God. Of course, being in a room like that, it is a very powerful experience because there’s a lot of personal stories in there and if you look around at the space, there are pictures of people in good health with notes and prayers on the back of them. “

  Do you have anymore panoramas from New Orleans to share on Roundme?

  “I do so much photography in New Orleans that even the folks in Baton Rouge where I live joke that New Orleans is my second home.”

    We look forward to seeing more of Brandon Ore's wonderful panoramas of the area on Roundme. Thank you so much for sharing your precious free time with us for this interview!

  This week’s Space of the Week is totally out of this world. Seriously. It features an abandoned complex from Star Conflict, an action-packed, massively multiplayer space simulation game that puts players in the role of elite pilots engaging in a widespread interplanetary skirmish.

  In a remote corner of the galaxy — Sector 1337, the area of the dead — a world has been left behind. Here, the ruins of a great civilization of Precursors have recently been discovered and the abandoned complex is its vestige. Researchers have not been able to understand why the complex was created or what purpose it served. The preserved structure is a ruined Precursor generator surrounded by a cloud of dust and machinery debris. Recently, research probes recorded a massive burst of energy emanating from the center of the station.  At first, researchers saw an unusual picture: the ancient mechanism started working again — a plasma pillar escaped the reactor, and the internal mechanisms started gradually waking up from the long sleep. All sides of conflict immediately began to pull their forces to this sector to get to the reactor. In the commotion nobody noticed a faint signal coming from the boundary of the zone. But it wasn’t long before the signal vanished without a trace.

  With the galaxy on the brink of war and the Precursors’ legacy at stake, elite pilots are in high demand. The Roundme Team enlisted in Star Conflict, gave it a try and found it to be a fast paced action PvP game with some PvE modes, that it is really really fun and super addictive. 

Oh, and yeah, it’s free to play and you can register here.  

There are 29 colorful and iconic lifeguard stations that dot the whites sands of South Beach in Miami Beach, Florida. These iconic structures are not only staffed and operate to serve public safety, they also are beautifully crafted works of art. However next year, according to Miami Beach officials, they will be demolished and replaced. In an effort to document their existence, these lifeguard stations are the subject of this week’s Space of the Week as photographed by Lenny Kagan. We begin with the following interview.

  Tell us why you decided to photograph these lifeguard stations?

  I was inspired to capture the "Space" surrounding all 29 of the iconic Miami Beach lifeguard stations after hearing very recently that they would soon be removed and replaced with new ones.  

  I believe that many of them have been there for close to 20 years or so since after Hurricane Andrew of 1992.  I took it as a short window of opportunity to capture a moment in time and preserve the historical value and soon memory of the original Miami Beach lifeguard stations.  

  These structures are very symbolic of Miami Beach, especially the ones between 1st and 10th street because these particular stands show up over and over in ads and marketing for and related to the city.  

  I heard there were 29 stands and when I searched for them online I found a few websites, some blogs and some posts on forums that contained usually between only five to fifteen of the stands.  There was no comprehensive list or image gallery of all 29.  So I set my goal to capture them all and put them together in a full 360º virtual tour for the first time ever!   It took me 6 days to capture them all.

  The scenes from 74th street to 85 street were captured on a day of very bad storms.  I had to take cover under a tree covering my camera with my hat and t-shirt for 45 minutes getting absolutely soaked waiting for the storm to pass. In some of those shots you can actually see it raining in the distance and the sky is extra dramatic with hints of blue sky peeking out mixed with dark storm clouds.  Also you will notice in those same scenes the stands are displaying red flags, which is a symbol to swimmers of dangerous currents and high surf.

  Other than that, I suffered from a few horrible cases of "farmer's tan" as a result of shooting on some very hot summer days!  Even though I scouted the areas online to locate the stands before going out I still had to learn the hard way that there are no stands located between 21st and 30th streets or 53rd and 64th street! It dawned on me as I was walking blocks and blocks in the sand, hallucinating from heat and dehydration, why maybe this comprehensive gallery hadn't been put together before -- the stands are elusive!  Hopefully not anymore.  

How did you get your start in panography?

  Short answer? Once I discovered it I just decided this is what I want to do!  

  Long Answer? In 2008 I was a full time Real Estate Agent and in the process of marketing properties for sale I became extremely interested in virtual tours and panoramic photography.  I began researching all the different types of virtual tours being used at the time, the good, bad and the ugly!  I eventually came across some amazing 360º images.  

  One I remember being inspired by was the interior of a cathedral with the ability to look straight up, straight down, and zoom far in to see every last detail in perfect focus! This was something I hadn't seen before and I was blown away!  Exploring the inside of a beautiful far away place as if I was there looking around in person! Awesome!

  Shortly thereafter I found myself more interested virtual tours and 360º photography than in real estate.  I decided I couldn't continue doing something I was not 100% passionate about so I began intensely researching the software and hardware needed to create such high quality panoramic images and virtual tours. So I launched my company Supreme Scene.

  With all the new developments in 360º image technology and photography plus the growing interest in the field, I'm as excited about it today as I was back then!

What do you like about panography?

  Seeing "everything".  Feeling like you are there.  Capturing the entirety of a moment in time.  The ability to experience a location without being there physically. Sharing experiences, events and places with others.  Adding elements inside virtual tours like hot spots, maps, floor plans, still photos, videos, links, text, and social media.

What's your camera set-up?

  At the moment I'm using a Canon EOS 7D, Sigma 8mm 3.5 fisheye lens, and the Nodal Ninja R1 Adjustable Tilt Ring Mount Head.

What's your workflow like?

  I usually shoot between 3-12 bracketed images for each quadrant of the final 360º image.  I like to blend these four sets of bracketed images together into high dynamic range by using either Photomatix or EnfuseGUI.  

  I have found that Photomatix is really amazing for removing "ghosts".  This is the method I used for my Miami Beach Lifeguard Stand project in order to "freeze" all of the beach activity including the moving people and the flags waving in the wind.

  After blending the images into HDR I usually stitch them together using Kolor Autopano Pro.  If there is little to no movement in a scene I will sometimes use PTGui to blend into and HDR and then stitch all at once.  

  After rendering the stitched panorama I bring it into Lightroom for color and lighting adjustments.  

  I then use KRPano tools to convert the sphere to cubes and make any edits that might be needed or desired such as touching up the nadir, adding my logo, removing tripod legs and shadows etc.  

  I then convert the edited cubes back to a sphere and render a final version of the 360º image.   

Do you have any tips for newcomers?

  Collaboration is greater than competition.  Surround yourself with professionals that you admire and can learn from. Think big and be different.  Do not wear black clothing and forget to bring a hat when you decide to spend hours photographing beaches in the middle of the summer!

As the days get shorter and we head into fall, we look back at what photographer Tapani Rantakokko did on his summer vacation as we feature his space "Manamansalo" as this week’s Space of the Week. We begin with asking him to tell us a bit about this picturesque location.

  “Manamansalo is an island at the center of one of the largest lakes in Finland, about two-hour drive from my home at the city of Oulu,” began Rantakokko. “There are miles of sandy beaches and great hiking tracks, plus a popular camping site. During summer holidays I took my family there for a few nights. Late in the evening, after we got our kids to bed in the camper, I grabbed my gear from the trunk and sneaked back to the beach. On these latitudes the sun sets about 10:30 PM in July, so I had just enough time to capture a couple of panoramas. The next night I did the same thing, so actually the photos are from two different nights.’

  “They are not perfect panos; even a lightly trained eye can easily spot many mistakes. More so from my older attempts. But as I am not a professional panographer, I feel that I have the privilege of not needing to maintain constant high quality appearance -- sometimes I get a better shot, sometimes not so good, but each one of them brings me back to that place and time. Isn't that the ultimate purpose of amateur photography, bring back some memories?” asked Rantakokko.

  Yes, we have to agree with you on that, Tapani.  Maybe even for professional photography, no? How did you get your start in panography?

  I studied software engineering in a local university and started my career as a research scientist in a large national research centre. That was during the golden years of Finnish mobile phone industry. There I met some talented people and had the honor to work with them on projects in which many of the now standard smartphone features were first developed. For example, we made a mobile phone learn and recognize free-form gestures drawn in the air with the phone already 12 years ago, or five years before the first iPhone was introduced.

  In 2006 six of us founded a spin-off company Finwe Ltd. to commercialize some of the technologies we had developed. It was a successful business for many years, but eventually the local mobile phone industry got severely bit by Nokia's decline. We needed to make a hard decision whether to close our office or try to re-build the company. Being stubborn Finns, we didn't want to give up, and started looking for new business areas.

  Our key strengths was -- and still is -- an understanding of sensors. We had worked with sensor fusion where accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope sensor data is mathematically combined to get an accurate value of device's attitude and heading. I wanted to apply this information for turning a camera in a 3D scene. So I made a demo where a panoramic 360 photograph from the interior of a BMW could be viewed with a phone or tablet simply by turning around while holding the device in hand.

  That demo turned out to be a great success, and a portal for us to the wonderful world of panoramic photography and video, which has now become Finwe's main focus area. It also sparkled a personal interest in me for 360 panoramic photography, as I wanted to be able to create such content myself for testing purposes, and also to understand the challenges, tools and workflow of the professional panographers, who would produce the content to be viewed with our player.

  How long have you been doing it?

  I made my first attempts to create my own 360 panoramic image just 18 months ago. I tried out various smartphone apps only to find out they were next to useless, so I grabbed my old entry level Canon DSLR and got a little better result with its kit lens and Hugin, an open source GUI for panotools. Then I bought a tripod, a panoramic head and a fisheye lens, and started really learning the secrets of making a decent 360 image. Now I use a full-frame camera and the best available software, but I feel I am still just an amateur with a rather expensive hobby...

  While you claim you are not a professional panographer, you still do quite lovely work. What do you like about panography?

  At first, I fell in love how challenging it was. That may sound weird, but I am a person who always seems to find the most difficult path to accomplish a task and quickly loses interest when something becomes a routine. Shooting great ordinary photographs had become so easy and commonplace with mass adoption of cheap DSLRs that I didn't find it interesting. But making great 360 photos still provide enough challenge and learning curve to keep me excited about it.

  Another treat is going out to the nature with a purpose. I lived my childhood in a small village about 200 miles North from the Arctic Circle. It is a silent but scenic part of the world and provides lots of opportunities for a photographer who is willing to take an extra mile, literally. While I have always enjoyed going to the forest, 360 photography has given me a great excuse for climbing up to the hills and sitting there alone with my camera several hours, watching the sunset or polar lights dancing high in the sky. That provides a great balance for a hectic work in the software industry.

  What's your camera set-up?

  Most of the time I shoot with Canon 6D and 10mm f/2.8 Sigma fisheye, but for gigapixel panoramas I use Canon 200mm f/2.8L zoom lens. I set them on a tripod with Nodal Ninja panoramic head. I know this is not the lightest setup to carry around, but I actually want to spend some time and effort, remember that I like to keep it challenging?

  Please describe your workflow.

  I am not experienced enough to remember how to do all the little things correctly on the shooting spot, so I have locked the panoramic head, taped the focus ring of the lens, and set a custom program in the camera. I also try to always repeat the same shooting patterns, such as four shots around at 90-degree intervals and then one down while tilting the camera and the tripod. But I frequently seem to forget something, and still haven't done that one perfect panorama yet... Whenever I feel that I am getting a hang of it, I find myself adding more challenge such as HDR or gigapixel.

  In the editing phase I first import raw files to Lightroom and make some initial adjustments, such as fix the orientation and reduce noise and chromatic aberration. Then I export everything to TIFFs and import them to PTGui, where I mask the tripod and stitch maximum resolution OpenEXR HDR file. After some small retouches in Photoshop I tone map the image with Photomatix and export a TIFF. I give it the final touch either in Lightroom or Photoshop -- I prefer Lightroom's interface much more, but I tend to forget which operators make local adjustments and easily expose the seam at the edge of the image.

  Do you have any tips for newcomers?

  In my opinion, the most important thing that sets 360 photography apart from all other kinds of images is its ability to arouse a sensation of being somewhere else -- especially when viewed via VR glasses. But to be able to freely look around has no utility if there isn't anything interesting to look at! So, number one priority should be to find spaces that are interesting to explore in multiple directions.

  This requires a change of mind, as you need to start looking at things and directions nobody usually cares about. Finding a good spot for a 360 is often hard and lonesome work, as an otherwise scenic place might be totally blunt when you turn your head around, and nobody understands why you are not satisfied. Sometimes beautiful light paints otherwise boring things pretty, sometimes it helps to move a little bit closer to reveal more detail.

  You discovered Roundme through a public conversation on Facebook. How do you feel about it now that you’ve been using it?

  When I started making 360s I exported them to my personal website using KRPano and similar tools. It works great, but this approach has two major drawbacks: there is no traffic unless I spend considerable effort and/or money, and I also have one more thing to maintain myself. Facebook seemed to be quite unfriendly platform for publishing panoramas. I also tried Google Views but considered it isn't worth the effort.

  So I wanted something simple that just works, a place where I can upload 360s and share links to. Roundme turned out to be just that. Especially, I like how easy it is to link panoramas together with a Portal. I think I have created too many of them already….

  What I'd still like to see added to Roundme is support for soundtracks and map integration, so I can share where exactly the pano was shot, and everyone can listen to the silence of the wilderness of Northern Lapland (pun intended).

  Thanks for the feedback, Tapani. The Roundme Team really loves to hear feedback from the community. The features you requested including some new ones should be rolling out by November if everything goes well. Be sure to subscribe to our blog for the latest updates!