SYDNEY SNAPSHOTS
PETER MURPHY’S PANORAMAS OF DAILY LIFE
by Michelle Bienias
Where can you find a slice of daily life in Sydney, Australia put under a microscope and then blown large? With fullscreen panoramas reflecting everything from current news events, such as a train ride celebrating the launch of the latest Harry Potter book, to photographic perspectives like the rear view of a person descending rain-drenched stairs, to a busker showing passersby the moon and Jupiter with his telescope.
Australian photographer Peter Murphy recently launched his Panoramic VR Weblog , which chronicles events and locales in and around Sydney that capture his interest. The blog contains an eclectic collection of fullscreen panos reflecting everything from photos of the Egyptian Room at the South Australian Museum , to a quiet sunrise at the Sydney Opera House and a shot of one of the bulky, mobile billboard trucks that are becoming an increasing occurrence around Sydney.
Asked to define his style, Murphy calls his blog a social documentary and points to a number of continuing themes: ships and the Harbour, urban environment and cultural heritage issues, parades and protests and crowds, art exhibitions and performance art, sunrises and sunsets, street scenes.
While Murphy thought the blog would motivate him to make more panoramas, his main motivation was to promote the concept of panoramic VR photojournalism. “Until recently, there weren’t the hardware or software tools to capture action scenes in the photojournalistic manner, but now there are so I think it is a concept whose time has come,” he says. Before the advent of VR technology Murphy specialized in wide-angle large format photography, using equipment such as Wideluxes and 360 scanning cameras. These days he uses a digital SLR (Nikon D1) and a 8mm Nikkor lens, various poles, monopods and homemade panorama heads.
What panoramas do viewers like the most? “The most significant blip in my hits log was for the panos of the telescope destruction at Mount Stromlo. This had techie appeal as well as news interest and visual symbolism,” Murphy says. The popular weblog BoingBoing , which often features VR panoramas thanks to enthusiast Xeni Jardin, sends a lot of traffic to his site, he adds.
My personal favorite is a colorful pre-dawn pano of the tall ship James Craig moored in Darling Harbour against an angry sky. But I also like some of his performance art panos like the “dot” installation by famed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. (I looked at every pano on Murphy’s site and, even though I have a high-speed connection, found them to load uncommonly fast.)
Murphy says his own favorite panos currently are the overhead crowd scenes, which he likens to a “complicated jigsaw puzzle” that only emerges after the glitches and errant stitches have been retouched; and the telescope fire destruction and dawn panoramas. “Although I don’t have them on my blog (except for one anaglyph one), a big interest of mine is stereoscopic panoramas and other content for VR hardware displays - including lately an autostereoscopic monitor,” he adds.
Murphy clearly has an appreciation for the nooks and crannies of Sydney and the quirks of its people that show through in his panos. He’s been photographing the city for 25 years and describes VR panoramas as a “definitive technology for capturing some of the remarkable things about [Sydney’s] light and space, and social energies”.
We think he’s got that right and plan to make Murphy’s blog a regular stop for our shot of Sydney’s unique energy.
Email: pmurphy4@bigpond.net.au
|  | |
| The purpose of this banner is to raise funds for a new VR community project VRMag will launch in a few months.
| |
