We love panoramas. But some projects (print designs, for example) call for more traditional, non-interactive still photography. In addition to our spherical panoramic PictureBubbles°, we also create high dynamic range still photos. Here are a few examples:

Carel Struycken was kind enough to create a panoramic PictureBubbles° portrait of my wedding two Saturdays ago. Alyssa and I were married at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County next to the dinosaurs. Carel captured the moment beautifully—in 360° Dino Vision! Our LED paper flowers look especially vibrant in HDR.

When our friends Jimmy and Sakura got married here in Los Angeles in 2007, I shot a series of panoramas at their wedding reception to spherically capture the moments for all time. Three years later, and with a little help from Photoshop CS5, I’ve finally finished processing them. Better late than never?

This weekend, I had the opportunity to sleep over at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and I couldn’t resist taking a few PictureBubbles° while I was there. Above is the “Birds of the World” exhibit, and below is the museum’s Fin Whale skeleton, under which we camped out for the night in tents.

The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile came to a parking lot near me today, and I was fortunate enough to sneak in a PictureBubble panorama before it headed off to spread joy and hot dogs to other parts of America.

Besides creating PictureBubbles° and designing things, I spend some of my free time gaming. While playing Halo 3 recently, I was feeling a bit disconnected from the experience and wondering how it would be possible to increase the level of realism in a “first-person shooter” like Halo. In the game, it is possible to change the direction that the player’s character is facing independently of the character’s movement in 3D space. While rotating the character’s head, however, there is no apparent parallax. That is, all stationary objects in the environment have no movement relative to each other while the character’s head (the camera) pans. Assuming for the sake of argument that Master Chief and the Arbiter (playable characters in the game) both have stereoscopic vision, and therefore depth perception, it would be impossible for either character to turn their head and not see some apparent movement.

This is a bit of a nitpicky detail, of course. But at PictureBubbles°, our spherical panoramic photography sits entirely on a foundation of parallax elimination. If we were unable to eliminate parallax during camera pans, objects in the PictureBubbles° would appear ghosted or doubled where the photographs’ edges failed to line up perfectly. In order to eliminate that parallax error, we carefully calibrate our panoramic tripod heads in order to rotate the camera about the entrance pupil of the lens. Perhaps we’d get a little deeper into the uncanny valley if more slight imperfections were introduced into first-person games, such as parallax, slight random movements like swaying or wind, and lighting changes due to clouds moving, etc.