He had the good fortune early on to work as an assistant for a year for the great Jeanloup Sieff, a famed fashion photographer in the 1960s and a good friend of Gliksman’s father, and a man whom Gliksman credits with teaching him much.

He also worked as Apple France’s official photographer in the mid-90s, a position that gave him a unique perspective of and insight into QuickTime VR, the VR Authoring Studio, and what he calls the “landscape panorama revolution”, launched by Helmut Dersch’s PanoTools software.

Gliksman’s more recent work includes a Virtual Tour of the Eiffel Tower and D-Day Spots: A Virtual Visit of D-Day Overlord, among many others, such as his Virtual Visit of Renault Techno-Center and his extensive work with sprites. He’s also an avid sailor who has participated in 17 trans-Atlantic races.

In this interview with VRMag, Gliksman discuss all of this as well as his mixed opinions about the future of the VR business model and his motivation to work on real content, rather than technology for its own sake. You can view more of Gliksman’s work on his website, La Grange Numerique.

Donjon Stereo pano (need red & green glasses to view)	Aboard Bonduell	SMART "forfour"
Geyser	Paris vu de la Tour	The Burren

Renault Magnum

Can you tell us a little about your background Denis; where you grew up, studied in school, how you first became interested in photography, where you live now, etc.?

I grew up in my parents' country house west of Paris. I followed short studies; I was not attracted by some subjects, and more than that, by the teaching methods. I had many side activities and passions: rock music, motorbike, rugby, karate, sailing, photography, etc. It eventually became evident that 1) I was more than fed up to stay put eight hours a day listening, 2) I had no intention to sit down for the rest of my life, and 3) The time had come to make a choice. I opted for photography and sold my guitar and amplifier and asked for a meeting with my school's principal, telling him I didn’t wish to come to school any more and would like to work at home. I guaranteed him that this way I would get my Baccalaureate degree, which I did.

You've had a long career in photography, beginning with photojournalism in the 1970s and later working as an illustrative photographer; can you tell us a little more about this period?

Freed from "scholastic" duties I started a subject on the Paris subway, and an auto photo tour in Scotland in February (not the best date for camping in the open) with a friend of mine, and a future photographer as well.

I paid for my film and printing paper by making photographs of my rugby players friends, but I had also found out that pro photographers were reluctant to use their outdated film, and it was often easy to get them for a very good price, usually a warm handshake. My subway photographs were then exhibited in a dedicated old wagon during the big Expo-Photo-Métro (1978), which was an important event.

Just after the baccalauréat, I worked for three months in a big color lab to raise money for a trip to Egypt. Young and alone, with very little money in a very different foreign country, this trip was very tense and, in a certain way, eye-opening. My pictures were only published many years later, and I realized that photojournalism was very difficult without money.

I spent one year in Jeanloup Sieff’s studio though, and then I had a good collaboration with the magazine "Parents", making children’s studio shots and scenario pictures, and I also did some illustration pictures for publishers. The photojournalism I had dreamed of was dead, but I knew that anyhow when I started.

Jeanloup Sieff was a good friend of my father’s and sometimes came home for dinner. I showed him my black and white images of Scotland, the metro, and from a series I had done on the little village where I was living. He offered me the use of his black and white lab to make some prints for my book. Later, he asked me to fill in as a replacement for his assistant for one month; I stayed with him one year.

Jeanloup helped me on every occasion, and later I traveled with him frequently. Thanks to him I learned to do "things for me" through assignments, sometimes far from the photography I dreamed of.

Your work as the official photographer for Apple France in the mid-90s put you in a unique position to assess the potential of QTVR and get involved from the very beginning. What were your thoughts and views on the technology at that time?

I bought a Mac 128 at the end of 1984, to prepare my sponsoring projects. After that, I worked on a project connected to the new computer and telematic (Minitel in France) technologies. To be honest, it did not progress very fast, but it created an opportunity to meet Apple's press attaché. At the end of the meeting she asked me if I could recommend a portrait and features photographer to replace their usual partner, the famous Magnum photographer S. Salgado, who was not available. I daringly offered myself for the job; of course, I had my “book” in the car. She said OK 48 hours later, and it was the start of a more than 12-year cooperation. I stayed freelance but I quickly become their preferred photographer, and I made more and more portraits, capturing the big events as well as products shots for the press and communications. The Apple people trusted me and gave me lots of freedom. It was a very pleasant collaboration but one had to react very quickly.

Surprisingly, I was the one pushing Apple in the use of new photo technologies for their daily needs. For instance, all the archives were in my home, but I was never able to build a real digital library for them. As soon as the machines were powerful enough, I conceived some digital slideshows of the reports and created digital albums. As we were very quick to react, we could make the new products' photographs and send them all over Europe in no time. Very often we were ready before Apple USA.

Ten years later, has QTVR photography met the expectations you had for it in 1995?

QuickTime
The real revolution happened with QuickTime, and indeed I was there in a very good position: all my Apple friends were working for the development or New Media and were very enthusiastic about the new software, and they shared that with me. “The Virtual Museum” was the rock in the pond; QuickTime VR was on the way. That was very exciting, and was in direct line with my interests - getting out of the "single image concept" and finding new ways to fill time and space, away from video.

The “Digital Barn”
This is the time when I acquired the farm, where I still live, and renamed “The Digital Barn” after installing my big studio. That was the beginning of a critical period; my main Apple partner had warned me a few months prior that Apple US wanted to recover the new product launches and would limit Apple France’s operating margin in terms of communication. Meaning: “there is practically nothing for you next year”. My collaboration ended with the conception and realization, alone with only one friend, sound engineer of the CD-Rom “10 years of Macintosh”.

My operating costs were going to increase and my income greatly decrease, but I was creating the tool I had been dreaming of for a long time: a big studio. It was an exciting period, with the “joys” of low budget renovation for the barn and the correction of the daily mistakes (when the workers did come).

QuickTime VR
At the beginning it was impossible to get the development tools, the famous "QTVR Authoring suite". And I was in a hurry to make a test as I had an assignment from Apple for the Cannes Milia. I did not hesitate to call my friend Bernard Denevi from Nikon to borrow a Nikon E2, (first pro-digital camera of Nikon). For the show I made digital panoramas and had them calculated by the QTVR gurus present at the show. They kept warning me that it would not work because the rules were not respected, because I had used a zoom lens, because the pictures were too big, etc. Eventually, they managed to calculate the panoramas, which of course were not perfect, (I had not respected the nodal point, I did not even know what it was) but it worked!

I then laid siege to the formation firm which had use of one of the first development kits in France, and it was not a small affair: Scripts to write in MPW, endless calculation delays, repetitive crashes…One of the chaps there was patient as an angel, and put me on the right track in one afternoon. (Those who have not experienced stitching under MPW with 32 Mo ram in a Quadra cannot understand.)

I spent a good deal of the summer preparing the Apple Expo 05’s virtual tour, which we had planned with Brieuc Segalen, then a member of the Apple team (now Bricq) and the chaps from the Lab. Everything was to be discovered and done, there were only one or two realizations available then, as far as I remember, The Company Store from Apple: the USS Enterprise Interactive Manual, a real achievement, also made by Apple. I had to progress on every aspect of picture taking, to understand the Hypercard pile system for the positioning of the hotspots, invent a machine to create QTVR objects, design and tune rigs to fulfill the nodal point requirements. I felt like I was alone on a desert island; it was wonderful. We managed to complete the real time Apple Expo visit, on schedule; the CD was recorded the following week and distributed with SVM Mac, a crazy undertaking, but it was the first big French QTVR realization. Orders followed rapidly, I could at last pay the studio building bills.

I discovered, to my great satisfaction, that thanks to the technologies I had pioneered, I could escape the hierarchy and standards of the advertising agencies, and get my orders directly from the customers, or the first web and multimedia agencies. In a week’s time I could show jewels, fashion, industry products, in QTVR, free from the usual a priori that often obliges a photographer to specialize himself.

PanoTools & Helmut Dersch
Surprisingly, Apple soon lost interest in its QTVR baby, and nothing followed the great "QuickTime VR Authoring Studio". We had to wait a long time for the arrival of QuickTime 5 to be able to read spherical panoramas. Then came a new revolution, and a big one, with the arrival of Helmut Dersch, who started the “panoramic landscape revolution” with the PanoTools libraries, enabling spherical panoramas and an enormous progression in quality of stitching in general.

There was no alternative software so we had to put our hands back in the grease, writing scripts again, discovering projections conversions. That was a time of hard work and excitement. In the beginning, about 50 people from all over the world were communicating 24 hours a day over the Internet, testing the programs that the German professor developed and corrected, in real time, at a crazy speed. It was a nice demonstration of the Internet’s potential. Another deserted island to discover...

Few people realize the importance of Helmut Dersch’s contribution, which were made even greater when you consider that after these creation tools he also created visualization applet tools with PTViewer, a Java alternative to QuickTime, and thus enabled ultra-performing virtual interactive visits. We can also admire the work of all the community that has improved all these tools.

Nice orders
Beside this R & D effort, I could execute a number of important orders in panoramic and QTVR Objects, it was very exciting, and I made a good living at it, so it was a good period:
- Virtual visit of Renault Techno-Center
- Vivabus
- State of the Art, Arch Foundation Project
- Renault production, all the cars in inside panoramas, outsides and engines in QTVR Object
- Renault F1, virtual visit of the Enstone and Viry Chatillon installations
- Arts Premiers CD-ROM
- The Eiffel Tower
- The Airbus
- The whole VPM charter fleet in Martinica
- Renault Trucks
- Saad Specialist Hospital in Saudi Arabia

Ten years later, now...

Post-production
The programs improve day after day, but when you have helped direct quality standards you become their prisoner, and eventually I spent as much, if not more time, in post-production as before. My files are numerous and huge, to the point that calculation times are very long and backups turned in a nightmare. I have more than 1000 GBs in hard disk space on my desktop and each job's back-ups fill several DVDs. In the past I used 16 Mo PCMCIA cards and I took more time to fill them than today’s 2 GBs compact flash cards with my D2X camera and raw files. I was rightly inspired to buy the G5 before the D2X as it was anyhow becoming unavoidable….

The market
It is strange. You often see products not up to the standards of the brands that have ordered them. There is a gap between some demos offered on the web and some of the works effectively ordered and paid for.

I agree with Scott Highton on his theory that a photographer should not give away his work and reproduction rights. I make quality and precision work, and I have to sell it, in all meanings. There is such a gap between my work and the panoramas found in the standard commercial virtual visits that I really should find other words to communicate. I think that the customers are not always able to see the difference, and it's our duty to help them, but sometimes they do not want to go further than “sufficient quality at minimum cost, so to avoid problems with the boss”!?.

Professionalism
Apart from one’s photographic creativity or quality, the photographer’s skilled response to the customer’s sometimes non-formulated request is also part of the performance and result. This applies to the selection of the shooting day and hour to the framing of the picture while directing the walk-on and rearrangement of the furniture -- what the photographer knows from experience. This is yet another reason why professionals are called for.

The Freelance (and lonely) photographer and new technologies
I have mixed opinions about the future of this "business model". Until now you could learn to use a camera, develop an eye and a sensibility and use that for the rest of your life. Today, you get a new Photoshop version every year, not to mention the different OS, the networks, Wifi, Raw files processing, color management and printing drivers. Digital photographers in 2006 probably do not make nightclubs managers wealthy; they have too many product updates and books to read at night (and most of them in a foreign language).

And I haven’t even mentioned the parent technologies, html, java, flash etc, which are useful to know to be a competent adviser for customers and partners. For a while it was possible to be a one-man band, but not any more. In my opinion, it has become too complicated. Maybe the creation of mini-teams will become a required track, to be able to keep a high specialization level, share communication efforts and maintain technology development monitoring, without devoting all your nights to the job. But more people will bring other economical constraints.

Let me be frank: After so many hours spent exploring technology's different aspects to improve quality and processes, mastering the high resolution spherical and/or animated and even stereo panoramas, I think it is now mature and sufficient to realize nice things. I still like R&D but would like to spend more time on real content.

You also created D-Day Spots: A Virtual Visit of D-Day Overlord sites, which contains over 40 panoramas of significant sites of the Normandy invasion. What motivated you to create this website, i.e. do you have a personal interest in the invasion, etc.? I imagine a lot of the site’s visitors are WWII veterans (the Internet savvy ones anyway), what kind of feedback have you received from them?

DDay Spots was a return to the “content”. I did it for myself, as a contribution to the memory of those who gave their lives for liberty. That was a non-profit action. It took a few days of Internet research and then two days of shooting spherical panoramas, with a monopod in most cases. Post-production was the longest part.

Trimaran, a long-time partner, agreed to participate and build the site for free. We had great feedback, mostly from the USA, and some French professors; a lots of nice emails. But out of all the French official organizations contacted to develop the project, we had only one reply, and it was negative. I would like to follow up on the project, but I have already devoted three weeks to it, I cannot work indefinitely on a project that does not help, at a minimum, to pay the bills.

Want to take a stab at predicting where QTVR photography will be ten years from now?

Key factors would be “economical prosperity” and “bandwidth growth”. Also, it goes along with photography’s future. If you rely on your customers to survive, you hope they will be sensitive, cultivated, bright enough to choose you, rich enough to give you the means to express yourself, and with enough humor to stand a “pain in the neck”, refusing to give up anything regarding quality.

The 360° vision fever will not last forever if we do not bring a human dimension, work on real subjects and refuse poor results.

What developments would you like to see occur?

I am not too sure. There are new things every day, like the direct link to cartography, Google Earth, for instance, offering new perspectives. I wait with confidence for the technology to develop and make production easier; big bandwidth on the net will allow high resolution, but, considering the content, what will be the state of mind in ten years?

I think that the QTVR-object has not really started yet, perhaps because of the weight of the files on Internet, but now with ADSL/broadband this should change. I did a lot during the CD-ROM epoch, but proportionally much less since the Internet has prevailed.

Digital cameras have made astounding progress, but when they'll have bandwidth of color negative it will help us. We all suffer from the battles of competing technologies that slow our markets, and we could dream of QuickTime and Sun's Java being distributed with PCs.

You’ve done some work with sprites – can you explain what these are and how they can enhance a panorama?

Sprites in fact are QuickTime internal programming commands created, for instance, to increase panoramas’ interactivity, or communication with external elements, another movie, web navigator, server and so on. Unfortunately sprites are not much used, and overall little asked for by web agencies, which often prefer to use technologies like Flash because they use Flash everyday, where they only sometimes import QuickTime elements.

There are two programs types to create sprites, simple programs enabling the introduction of simple sprites “ready to use” like Cubic Connector from ClickHere Design or DeliVRator from VF Tools, for instance to add an automatic rotation, and very powerful programs like VRHotwires from Bill Meikle or LivStagePro from Totally Hip. VRHotwires enables the creation of simple actions and sound, managing a complex rotation, and incredible ones like, for instance, animated panoramas. With LiveStage Pro you can build a complete application.

But we must also mention little-known in France tools like Ishell from Tribeworks, a valuable successor to Apple Media Tool from the same authors, enabling one to very easily introduce and pilot QuickTime elements; but to be frank, it is used more with CD-ROMs or kiosk products.

A few years ago you created an extensive virtual tour of the Eiffel Tower, Can you tell us a little about this project and how it came about? Were there any special considerations or unexpected challenges with the shoot?

The Eiffel Tower is a customer of the Trimaran firm, with whom I had previously worked. The Tower virtual tour was not ordered as it appears now. First, there was a small order of a few panoramas for the trade galleries, and two years later they wished to develop the visit on the basis of the propositions I had made.

As far as I was concerned, I was technically ready for a high level virtual visit in spherical panoramas, the post-production tools were not as easy to use as now, but I had learned to use them as they were, and for the shooting the technical problems were well known: lighting differences, crowds, shooting time, access authorizations.

But there were also the usual commercial parameters: number of panoramas limited by the budget, number of people to persuade to accept the technical choices, and the validity of the choice of three different resolutions, among them the Fullscreen version in QuickTime VR that I wanted to do, and the Java version with the PT Viewer applet. At that period there were few full screen panoramas, and broadband access was not widely available, so you had to keep low bandwidth alternatives.

Then a year or two later we did made a third product, "Paris seen from the tower", based on four panoramas showing all of Paris in very, very high resolution. That was an interesting experience, and I then made a theoretically impossible picture by joining together the four panoramas.

I understand that you have sailed and raced across the Atlantic many times. Can you elaborate on this passion?

My father was a professional sail reporter and racer. Since I was six years old, I went sailing with him, then cruising, then racing. I helped him prepare his boats for single-handed races and was, at the age of 12, a member of the crew that won the International Marseille week on his 58 ft ketch, “Raph”. Later, I was crewing for him on his 51 ft trimaran when we capsized halfway between Bermuda and New York, to be picked up only ten days later by a tanker. A few months later my father and I raced a two-man transatlantic race. I was now ready to race single-handed myself!

To me, sailing is fascinating because of its connections with nature, human relations, technology, communication, and media; it enables one to experience solitude as well as the worst wantonness; anyone can find there what he is after.

Around 1979 I started ocean racing seriously, as part of the crew on big boats or single-handed. That was a wonderful period for me! I didn’t need to win to participate; getting to the other side was enough of a goal. But it forced me to be a “jack of all trades”, and do nearly everything myself. In fact, we spent more time around the boat than in it. Then sponsoring came to the rescue, and I could sail a Figaro race and two transatlantic single-handed races. Single-handed racing was my preference, but I also enjoyed racing with one or two good friends. I eventually grew tired of waiting beside the phone for sponsoring confirmations, and went back to photography in 1985. My last race, in 1987, Lorient-St.Pierre-et-Miquelon and back, was as a crewmember and navigator for Eric Tabarly, and we won the return leg back to Lorient.

I keep in touch with the sea, I still have a boat, and try to sail as much as my schedule allows.

Whose panoramic work do you admire, and why?

Very embarrassing question: I do not know all the panoramic photographers, and none of them personally, so I am not in a position to comment globally on their work. What is certain is that there are on this planet a number of guys and girls having made at least one panorama, superb in capturing a moment, or wizardry of location, or for their technical virtuosity. For that reason it would be difficult to mention all of them, and what is more, even if I like an image, it might not be representative of their everyday work.

Among the pioneers, we can mention Andrew Nemeth, who was one of the first to make “wide angle” panoramas (before the spherical), with a real concern for image quality and expert on sound too. We should also mention Peter Murphy, Philo, Eric Goetze, Ken Turkovsky, and many, many others…

In the recent and spectacular, we could speak about Romuald Vareuse's aerial work on Reunion Island. Ignacio Ferrando did a surprising VTT rider. We also could speak about Jook Leung's live panoramas, etc.

On this point the best is to visit Hans Nyberg’s site. Besides making nice panoramas himself, and assembling nice Apollo mission panoramas, he really contributed to the fullscreen panorama with his site www.panoramas.dk, where a number of superb panos cans be found. Of course without forgetting the ones published on vrway.com….

Do you have plans for any interesting projects on the horizon?

I would like to devote more time to my personal production, keep working on the Morocco, Iceland and Ireland landscapes, and on some other ideas too long kept in standby, such as books and exhibits.

What panorama-related equipment and software do you use and recommend?

Studio 10x15 meters –Nikon cameras: D2x, D70, F100 Lenses 8-10,5-16-20-35/70-105macro-80/200.
Custom rigs for panoramas. Machine for VR Objects.
Software: PTMac and PTgui, Stitcher. Photoshop CS2. NikonCapture. Adobe Camera Raw. CubicConverter, CubicConnector, VRHotwires, DeliVRator, Anabuilder.
Email Denis Gliksman: gliksman[at]club-internet[dot]fr