by Thomas Bachand, ©2002-2005
I could feel the digital train pulling into the station when my local E6 lab told me that fashion, catalogue, and news photographers have, in large part, gone digital. So in the face of the inevitable, I put together the best portable digital kit I could get may hands on and set out for a couple of days of intensive field work.
To stretch the digital limits I set my sites on assembling a four-room QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) tour of the Chapel of the Chimes, a historic building in Oakland whose contributing architects include Julia Morgan. Apple's QTVRcubic technology enables the computer user to view a setting in a full 360°, including up and down. The multimedia movies are an assemblage of still images stitched and rendered as a seamless composite, as if to the inside of a sphere. As I was using only a moderately wide 28mm lens and was dealing with the digital cameras 1:3 lens ratio (low by digital standards), my effective focal length was 36mm. This meant that I would need to shoot a total of fifty images - four horizontal rings, each of 12 images spaced 30¡ apart, plus one image each top and bottom.
My bag of tricks included Apple's G4 PowerBook, the Kodak DCS 760, the Kaidan Quickpan Spherical tripod head, and, for image processing and assembly, software by Adobe, Realviz, and VR Toolbox.
The Kaidan Quickpan Spherical tripod head was at the heart of this project's success. It is a sturdy apparatus with dual rotating axis, bubble level, and clear positioning scales for both camera mount position and rotation. Click stops allow for easy, error-free panning. Once properly setup images are quickly captured - an imperative in terms of both shifting daylight and the ease of final image assembly. Just as with film, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The Kodak DCS 760 allowed me to go directly to a digital file - no film, no Polaroid, no run for supplies or to the lab. Shoot the image. Check it on the LCD and, if in doubt, check the histogram. Click-stop to the next position. This "check as I go" procedure allowed me to bend the "single exposure" rule of QTVR and slightly adjust my exposures by as little as one-tenth of a stop increments as I moved from light to dark areas and back again. Kodak's 6MB raw files squeeze twenty-one images onto a single flash card. As the camera holds two cards I could either shoot twice as many images or instantly back up my shots by shooting to both cards simultaneously. A Firewire connection allows for easy download to the G4 PowerBook, where the images retain all their capture information. Kodak's proprietary software converts them to 18MB tiffs - albeit a manual process without the luxury of batch processing. Once in Photoshop I batch processed with a custom Action to warm up, downsize, and prep for the stitching process. While the lens factor meant I was shooting more images, going digital saved me both time and cost and left me with images free of film grain and scanning artifacts.
The glitch in my "all digital" shoot, ironically, came after the shooting was done and the image files were ready to go. It was my bad luck to get caught in the transition limbo of Realviz Stitcher's conversion from Mac OS 9 to OS 10. I lost a great deal of time reconfiguring, rebuilding, and jumping between Mac platforms. By the time you read this an OS 10 patch should be out to fix these problems. Due to its memory requirements, Stitcher is definitely an OS 10 application and cannot be recommended for those running OS 9. That being said, Stitcher does an admirable job of lining up the images in an easy to use, intuitive two-window interface. The panoramas come together easily once one gets the hang of it. A great feature of Stitcher is its ability to save a project as a template. Once a project is assembled, future projects shot under the same specifications can be automatically assembled.
The final step was to tie my various scenes together into a virtual tour. For this I used SceneWorks by VRworks. This handy little app maps the project as well as links the scenes directly together. SceneWorks is able to set initial views, link scenes together, link them to a common map, and reconfigure the actual movie file, changing compression, size, and so forth. This is one of those deceptively simple-looking applications that actually does so much, so transparently, that the power of the computer gets taken for granted. Take a look at http://www.thomasbachand.com/animation/ for the final product.
Working tirelessly in the background to make all this high-end computing a reality was Apple's PowerBook with its landmark G4 processor. This 1" thick powerhouse is not only up to three times faster than its Pentium counterparts, but with its letterbox display, offers the working space of a 17" monitor. More important to me, though, is the Macintosh's system level graphics ability which offers image critical applications a cleaner and truer operating environment. Coupled with Apple's completely integrated hardware philosophy and the system's true plug and play ability, one can see why third party imaging software is developed primarily for the Mac. For more on OSX read my article at http://www.asmpnorcal.org/news/osx.html.
In the final analysis, despite the impeccable performance of my hardware, software difficulties made my "all-digital on location" target an impossibility. Regardless, the day is coming soon when the repetitive tasks that delayed this project will be automated, so that even a project as complex as this will be completed before the equipment gets back to the studio.
More importantly, though, this experience points out the realities of our new working environment where film production is being replaced by digital production - the later requiring a substantial capital outlay for the required equipment and know-how. As our business changes, so must our business model. Perhaps, the transition to digital presents us with the opportunity to transform our industry and turn around those forces setting us back.
For more details on this technology, check out the following resources on the Internet:
Thomas Bachand is the editor and webmaster for ASMP Northern California. His digital photography work includes animations of Eadweard Muybridge motion studies and a QTVR panorama of San Francisco in 1851. Visit http://www.thomasbachand.com/animation for a closer look.