He’s a natural storyteller who has led an interesting life, one that has taken him from UC Berkeley to University College London, from a turbulent period on the island of Dominica to teaching in Palo Alto and New Orleans to selling computers in Monterey. He is now the Director of the Geography Computing Facility, University of California, Berkeley, a position that allows him to explore his passion for teaching, love of nature and photography and tinker with computers. He recently returned from a five-day trip searching for spring wildflowers, which he found of course, photographing miles of peach orchards in the San Joaquin Valley, and waist- high sunflowers, fields of dandelions and sand verbena in the desert. He camps alone in the desert and has clocked 2500 miles in his last two weekend trips

Don lives north of Berkeley, California, in El Cerrito, in a home perched on a steep hillside on the crest of the Berkeley Hills, facing east into Wildcat Canyon. “Our view is protected as a regional park, so it is wild and will remain so,” he says. “We hear coyotes howling at night and see a lot of wildlife - there is a Cooper's hawk nesting just below our house. When we want to go hiking we just walk down the street and 200 yards to the park entrance.”

Don has taken many photography excursions throughout the western U.S., Canada and Mexico, sometimes accompanied by Landis Bennett (who along with Don started the popular World Wide Panorama series) and Kat Kalamaras, both of whom first met Don as geography students at Berkeley when he was just starting to explore this new technology called VR. Since then they’ve traveled together from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of Baja California, taking many panoramas along the way.

click here to view World Wide Panorama

Don is well noted for his encyclopedic knowledge of geography, flora and local history and his ability to recall minutiae and spin it into an interesting story. Landis and his fiancé Kat, characterize a trip with Don as follows: "’And out the left window you'll see a little yellow flower that is only seen in this one section of California. The interesting thing about this flower is that the missionaries knew that when they saw this it was a good place to set up a mission. Out the right window you'll see some rock stripes that some professors would say don't happen anywhere but in Arctic landscapes. Considering that we're in the desert now, perhaps those professors should try going on a trip with us. Hey you in the back, look out the window. This is fascinating stuff!’ Except Don's commentary would all be deadly accurate. How he has all of this stuff memorized I'll never know.”

Don Bain’s immense virtual reality website - VirtualGuidebooks- contains over 4000 panoramas, including 2700 fullscreen panoramas and eight guidebooks.

click here to view Don Bain's VirtualGuidebooks

You have many geography-related interests - geology, landscape photography, flora and fauna – and as well you’re quite proficient with computers and software; how did these interests develop over time and what are you currently most passionate about?

My interest in natural history began with family trips to Yosemite, Monterey and other parts of California when I was a kid. We always went on the naturalist walks and spent time in the museums, and I studied field guides and read books on natural history on my own. My particular fascination has always been trees, and I have traveled the west studying them. California has the tallest, the most massive, and the oldest trees in the world.

I would call myself a naturalist rather than a scientist, having acquired expertise on my own over the years. I never took any of the basic science classes in college, and my graduate study, officially in biogeography, was also self-directed. Geography as a major gave me the freedom to take classes all over the huge Berkeley curriculum, from forestry to city planning to art. I took practically every geography course offered in those four years. Not a very efficient preparation for real world employment, but I never even considered that, I just pursued whatever interested me.

My driving passion over the last few years has been characterization of landscapes through VR photography. People in the VR field fall mostly into three groups - those who regard it primarily as a business opportunity, others who are fascinated by the technology, and those who use it as a medium for artistic expression. I am closest to the last group, and strive to make beautiful images. But my real focus is the subject matter, the landscapes and places I depict. I am sure many people browsing my site wonder "why did he take a picture of that?" The answer is usually that I found it to be geographically significant.

I travel as much as I can, leveraging weekends, holidays, and three weeks a year vacation to the utmost. In the fall semester I teach the geography field class, three trips of 3-4 days each around California. It is a lot of fun and a tremendous experience for the students (almost unanimously acclaimed their best class ever at Berkeley). But I don't get any panoramas done on those trips, I'm just too busy teaching and leading.

You and Landis Bennett started the popular WWP series last year around this time; has its popularity exceeded your expectations? Can you share any thoughts or plans you have for the forthcoming year regarding WWP?

Landis and I have been very pleased with the way the World Wide Panorama has caught on. It is doing exactly what we wanted it to do, bringing VR photography to a wider audience, and fostering an international community of VR producers. We are starting a second year, and will keep it going at least to next December. It is especially encouraging to see a steady stream of enthusiastic new participants, and the truly international nature of the group. We work hard to keep the tone positive and inclusive.

The theme for the March Equinox event is "marketplace", which will be followed by "water" on the June Solstice. September and December are not yet decided, but we are planning a "best of the year" showcase for January 1, 2006. It will be open to anyone who has previously participated in the WWP, and will allow them to show off their best fullscreen panorama taken in 2005.

You’ve traveled extensively throughout the west coasts of Canada, Mexico and the U.S., even driving up to the Arctic Circle with Kat and Landis; which trips are the most memorable for you, and why?

A few years ago I had a particularly enthusiastic cohort of students, and we had some great geography field trips. One of the best was a long Spring Break trip through the deserts of eastern California to Zion Canyon in Utah and Toroweap at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It rained practically the entire trip (an El Niño year). Coming back from Toroweap, 60 miles of unmarked dirt roads, I decided to take a shortcut. Disaster - just as it got dark we got stuck in the mud, both the vans and the big Suburban. Then it began to snow. We eventually managed to spin the vehicles in place on the incredibly slick mud, eighteen of us manhandling them, then put on snow chains and thrashed our way back to pavement. Everyone was slathered in red mud and freezing cold, but I had an idea. We headed for Pah Tempe Hot Springs. The man at the gate looked at our California license plates and said sternly "no nudity, this is Utah", so we had to rent swimsuits. It was a great experience; floating in the springs where they come out of caves at the base of a cliff, with the Virgin River in flood just a few feet below us.

For several years before this I had been extending my explorations further and further north, until one summer I made it to the end of the road - Inuvik in Canada's Northwest Territories, 250 miles past the Arctic Circle. Some of the students talked me into organizing a similar trip the next summer. So eight of us, including Landis Bennett and Kat Kalamaras, drove two SUVs from Berkeley to Inuvik and back, a total of 7600 miles, in 23 days. We actually went a little past the end of the road by chartering a plane (Landis flew it part of the time) to Tuktoyuktuk, on an island just off the Arctic coast - we could see the frozen ocean a few miles off shore. This was on the summer solstice, the season of "midnight sun" in the Arctic, and we watched the sun circle all the way around us, just touching the horizon at midnight.

Landis and Kat and I made another long trip together last year at Spring Break, driving from Berkeley to Cabo San Lucas and back, the complete length of the Baja California peninsula in Mexico. Incredibly beautiful landscapes of desert and coast, 18th century Spanish missions, swimming in the jade-green Sea of Cortez - the panoramas are all on my site in fullscreen.

Most of my long "panorama" trips are taken alone. Last summer I spent a leisurely three weeks progressing up Vancouver Island then taking the ferry to Bella Coola. These panoramas are also now on the web - ”The Coast and Islands of British Columbia" - and constitute some of my best work.

You recently reduced your university time to 80% to work on some of your other projects, including your VirtualGuidebooks website. What are your plans for the website, and what else are you working on?

Projects for this new "freedom time" include creating fullscreens for most of VirtualGuidebooks, increasing income from my affiliates (Amazon etc), catching up on adding panoramas to the site, and preparing my digital photos for printed output.

Fullscreens have such a dramatically different effect on viewers it's almost like inventing a new technology. I thank Hans Nyberg for that insight. Fullscreen makes such a difference in people's perception of VR panoramas, they can finally see the detail, and appreciate the beauty, meaning, and significance of the places portrayed. I considered starting a new site to be all fullscreens, but decided it would be foolish to give up the excellent linking and Google ranking that VirtualGuidebooks has earned over the years. I have now created fullscreen versions of almost all panos taken since January 2000, a total of about 2700. There are fullscreen versions of eight guidebooks (chapters) on-line, and four more nearly ready.

I have been making a database of the panos, something I have tried before, but always got swamped and it was out of date before finished. But this time I have almost completed it. The database should be very useful in managing these assets for different purposes. I am using FileMaker to start, but might switch to an asset management program such as Extensis Portfolio.

Don, you have an interesting academic background that led you to spend some time on the Caribbean island of Dominica before you finally settled at UC Berkeley; can you tell us more about it?

I have never had something as normal as a career plan; I have just sort of followed my muse wherever seemed interesting at the time. I started college at UC Berkeley with city planning in mind, but drifted into geography. In my senior year I took a course on Middle America (Mexico, Central America and the West Indies), and a graduate seminar in biogeography, and decided that was really the subject I wanted to pursue. Prof James Parsons suggested I might follow up this interest at University College London, where two of his former students were on the faculty.

That was an exciting time. I graduated from college, led three Sierra Club trips in the high country, got married in a huge society wedding, packed up and moved to England, all in two months. It was an amazing contrast, suddenly moving from bright sunny California to stodgy gray drizzly London. But I fell into the new lifestyle easily. My mother is English, I spent part of my early childhood in England, had been there several times before, and have relatives scattered around.

The UCL Geography department's graduate program was a total surprise - they didn't have one. No classes, no seminars, minimal contact with faculty, just twenty new postgraduate students from around the world wondering what to do. We were expected to get right down to dissertation research. I chose the island of Dominica, the most remote, least developed, and wildest of the Windward Islands (it is between the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique). It is a rugged volcanic island with spectacular scenery and a relatively intact natural environment.

My research plan was to investigate a project to develop the interior of the island, with plantations of coffee, cocoa, and limes. It began with the building of the Imperial Road, started in 1876 but abandoned, started again in 1898, once again unsuccessful. It only had to cross an island 15 miles wide (the road is about 30 miles long), which gives you an idea of the challenges of building in the wet interior. Some years later I met Sir Lawrence Lindo, who told me that when he was governor of Dominica he had finally completed the road - in 1955!

What was life like on Dominica?

I could tell many stories of my life in Dominica, two visits of seven months each in 1973 and 1974. It was a different world then, very isolated, no television. In the interior villages I was often the first white man ever seen by the younger children, who would follow me around crying out "Beke, beke-blanc" (white man in the local patois). My Japanese-American wife was even more of a curiosity, the only Asian on the island. We lived first in a village on the leeward coast, surrounded by friendly people, learning about life in the tropics first-hand. Then we moved up into the mountains, where I was nominally the manager of a banana plantation on the L'Imprevue Estate. We lived in a decayed old plantation house with a magnificent view, rainbows every afternoon. No electricity and a long way from anywhere. We had kerosene lights, a kerosene refrigerator, even a kerosene oven, and baked our own bread twice a week. We rode the country buses into town for market day - converted trucks crammed with people from the windward coast and all their produce.

My work was in the rain forest and I went out exploring almost every day. I became adept with a cutlass (machete), a skill that gave me credibility with the locals. I hacked my way through the jungle, and uncovered paved trails built by the French in the 1750's, and the foundations of ill-fated plantations from the 1890's. I "discovered" waterfalls up to 300 feet tall and hot springs. I was wet all the time - that area gets up to 400 inches precipitation per year. Once it rained so hard I thought I was going to drown standing up, then was cut off by floodwaters for several hours.

In London between the two stays in Dominica I feverishly researched both the history and natural history of the Windward Islands. After Christmas I flew back to California. My wife and I were both pining for something not green and damp, so we spent a week in Death Valley, then a roundabout route back to Dominica, with stops at Harvard and the Smithsonian to meet Caribbean experts. Then the totally unexpected - on the overnight bus ride from Winston-Salem to Miami I developed pneumonia and almost died.

Finally back in Dominica we found that things had changed. A dissident group known as the "dreads" were causing unrest and committing random acts of violence against the government and others. A tourist was killed while watching the Mardi Gras parade - he was just the first white person handy. The Supreme Court judge was assassinated, and a state of martial law declared. Then the dreads disappeared, moving to secret camps in the interior.

Our friends advised us not to go back to L'Imprevue, it was too isolated to be safe. So we lived at Springfield Plantation, in a guarded compound with a few British expats. Springfield belonged to John Archbold, an American millionaire, who ran it as sort of a hotel, but also his Caribbean hideaway. It was a lovely place, just on the edge of the high rainfall belt so it was green and lush with rainbows, but a thousand feet up so it was cool. I continued to hike in the forest, but also did research down in the capital town of Roseau. We lived a comfortable life there, frequent parties with the old colonial set, Mr Archbold showing up once in a while, lots of gin and tonic, canapes served by bashful barefoot maids from mountain villages in starched uniforms. Alec Waugh was part of this social set, and wrote a book about it, "Island in the Rain". We realized later that we knew the originals of most of the characters and places in the book.

One night after a big party there came a knock on our door, after midnight. A neighbor was asking our blood types - one of the guests had been attacked by the dreads on his way home. Their favored mode of assassination was decapitation by cutlass, and he survived by virtue of his strong bull neck. More murders followed - an elderly Danish couple who had built their dream home on a clifftop in the interior had their heads cut off. With only about a hundred white people on the island (total population about 80,000) we could see our number coming up fast as the toll mounted to a dozen. Then the government officially asked all whites to leave the country for their own safety. We were off the next day, to Guadeloupe, sort of a mini last days of Saigon. We left most of our belongings behind, taking my books, papers, and photographs. It was a sad end to an amazing period in my life.

During this period of turmoil in Dominica I continued my explorations, sometimes meeting armed military patrols. There was one incident that I realized later could easily have been fatal. I was following a trail, one I had never noticed before, in very thick rain forest. It was a well-worn trail, so I assumed it led to a remote plantation. After half a mile or so I turned a corner and walked right into the middle of a circle of dreads, sitting on stumps or sprawled on the ground. There were rifles and machine guns around, and a heavy cloud of marijuana smoke. I stopped and looked around, they stared back, nobody moved. I turned in place and walked quickly back into the forest, then ran back to the road and flagged a passing vehicle. I probably owed my life to the dread's indulgence in ganj, a Rastafarian trait - they were too stoned to catch me, if indeed they even tried. I realized two weeks later, when the Danes were killed nearby, that these must have been the culprits. After we left Dominica there was a pitched battle between dreads and the Dominica Defense Force (army), and several were killed.

Sounds like Dominica was quite the experience! What did you do after you left the island?

The next two years were spent doing mostly historical research. I obtained a readers ticket for the British Museum. I went daily to the grand Reading Room, sitting where Karl Marx, Mohandas Ghandi and George Bernhard Shaw had sat. Then I spent literally a year reading the daily correspondence of the Dominican colonial government and their supervisors at the Colonial Office. I was immersed in that time, from the 1890's to about 1920. I would watch a young clerk mature into a principal then a senior staffer in the Colonial Office, then change his name as he was knighted, sometimes even again if he become a lord. Then he would die. I was devastated; it was like losing personal friends.

Four years after leaving home we decided to come back. My generous scholarship money was all gone and student loans were not available for study abroad. Also we missed the landscapes of our native place, California. I realized how much I needed the redwood forest, Yosemite, San Francisco, the Golden Gate, Big Sur, the High Sierra, and the deserts.

So you finally came home to California.

Yes, we got an apartment in Palo Alto and I set about looking for a part time job. To my amazement I found an opportunity to teach right away. I made my pitch to several districts - to teach geography of California, illustrated with my slides. They had reservations about whether "geography" would appeal to people, so I called my course "Discovering California". It was a huge success. I ended up teaching four nights a week and leading field trips most weekends.

I did this for a year and a half. Didn't make much money, but had a good time. I got to know one of my students particularly well. He was a law professor on sabbatical from Tulane University, working in the administration at Stanford. As it turned out, he was being offered a promotion, to become Dean of the University College when he returned to New Orleans. He was allowed to bring in his own team and seemed to be impressed with how I managed my classes and field trips. So he offered me a job.

It was a good job, Assistant Dean of the University College. I rode the Saint Charles Avenue streetcar to work and wore white seersucker suits. New Orleans has a fascinating history and culture, totally different than California or London. At one point I even considered settling down there, despite the wretched climate. But inevitably I was drawn back to California, where I have remained since.

Did you ever finish the studies you started in London?

I guess New Orleans was the last time I even considered finishing my degree. All it would take would be to write up the notes I still carried with me. I even bought a special desk to write at. But I was newly single and living in a legendary party town. The West Indies of a century before seemed a long way off and my interest in it was fading. I left New Orleans after two years and changed careers, choosing to pursue computer graphics. And that's where it stands now; my notes are still in a filing cabinet in the garage, leaving me forever A.B.D. (all but dissertation).

Have you returned to Dominica since the 1970s?

I went back for a vacation from New Orleans. There had been a monster hurricane and the island was devastated.

Springfield survived (the prime minister was living there) but L'Imprevue was destroyed down to the foundations. All the rain forest trees were defoliated and snapped off fifty feet up. The grand trees in the botanical garden and along the coast road were uprooted - they were old friends, I knew who had planted them and when (mostly in the 1870's). The stone walls of the cathedral had been blown down, the little cracker-box houses in the villages had been bowled down the streets and into the sea. I had obtained the very first satellite photo of Dominica and donated it to the Victoria Museum, where it had hung in a position of prominence, framed in native hardwood and with a nice little brass plaque. The whole museum building blew over the cliff into the Caribbean and sank.

I looked up old friends and found them destitute, many having lost their houses and everything except the clothes they were wearing. I ended up signing over all my travelers checks to them.

My self-appointed territory for panoramic documentation is western North America and Pacific Islands. But I might be tempted, given the opportunity, to go back to the West Indies. Dominica in particular would be a wonderful place for VR panoramas.

Don, your position as Director of the Geography Computing Facility, Berkeley, would, I imagine, require you to be knowledgable about computers. When and how did you pick up this experience?

When I was at Tulane I was assigned to investigate and institute word processing for administrative offices. As I learned more about computers I began to develop an interest in them. We were using VT100 terminals to a PDP-11 running Unix, pretty much a text and numbers system. But the first desktops came out just then, the PET, TRS-80, and Apple. My interest grew out of long experience with color photographs - I wanted to invent the "digital slide show".

When I came back from New Orleans I was determined to learn about computers and even to build one myself to do full color graphics. I studied hard and designed a computer, which would have cost over a million dollars to build. In the meantime I was working in a nursery, selling trees for about minimum wage. I loved the nursery business, but it had no future, so I switched to selling computers, got promoted to management in six weeks, and soon after got to manage my own store. This involved moving to Monterey, one of the most beautiful places in the world. It was a nice little store in the historic part of town. I could hear the barking of sea lions from my office, and walk along the waterfront at lunchtime. The store eventually failed, but in the meantime I learned a lot about computers.

Luckily I landed a job teaching geography at the local community college, enjoyable but very underpaid. It was looking like I might have to give up and get a real job when another unanticipated event took my unplanned career in a new direction. An old friend had been working in the geography department at Berkeley for years and spotted an opportunity to develop a computer specialty there. He had obtained special funding for a "distributed computing facility" and needed a director, someone with a background in academic geography, teaching, computers and administration. I got the job and started in August 1986.

At first I had two IBM PC-AT's, two Micro-VAX minicomputers, and an IBM 5080 graphic workstation. They were next to useless to me, in my continuing quest for the "digital slide show". A few weeks after starting the job I managed to obtain a Macintosh (Mac Plus with 1MB RAM and a 20MB hard drive). I had been reading about the Mac, but had never used one before. I was enthralled, and stayed in my office until midnight that first day, exploring the possibilities. I could see that this would be the future of my computing facility.

So I traded in those expensive MicroVAX's and got twelve Mac Pluses and two LaserWriters. I set up two labs for student use, which was bitterly opposed by some of the faculty. I started teaching a computer course, no programming (which was the standard approach at that time), just productivity programs: word processing, spreadsheet, database, graphs, statistics, paint, draw, even presentation graphics (before PowerPoint). It was a big success and I taught it for ten years. Now, ironically, I can't get students interested in it - they feel they already know enough about computers.

At first I went to a lot of computer shows, searching for new software. Very discouraging, all the mediocre stuff for DOS and next to nothing for Macintosh. But the search paid off when I met the project manager for a new product from Aldus called FreeHand. This was one year after the introduction of Adobe Illustrator, which opened the door for PostScript authoring programs, but had many drawbacks for cartography (map-making). FreeHand was much better - layers, styles, excellent text controls, support for TIFF images. It became the basis for computer cartography as it is now practiced.

I don't claim to have invented this new methodology for publication cartography, but I systematized it and was teaching it before anyone else in the country. My students from that first FreeHand class moved out into cartography studios all over and spread the new technology. We still teach nearly the same techniques today, seventeen years later. It is my main teaching obligation each spring semester - ten classes, four hours each, on the computer basics of publication cartography. I team-teach with Darin Jensen, staff cartographer, who handles all the non-computer aspects of cartography.

You’ve had a relatively long association with the IVRPA (formerly IQTVRA), can you summarize your previous work with the association and your current duties?

I joined the IQTVRA years ago, but didn't participate much until this last year, when Landis talked me into running for the board of directors. It has been frustrating, working in a committee spread halfway around the globe, all of us with busy lives and competing projects. My highest priority a year ago was to change the url and the association name, which has now been done. The next was to make the website into a first-rate resource for the VR community, which is making some progress behind the scenes. My goals for the coming year are a completely new web site, and to reach out to educators.

A Sampler of Fullscreen VR Panoramas from Don Bain's Virtual Guidebooks
- The Alaska Railroad station in Talkeetna, Alaska.
- Wheat fields to the horizon, Wheatland County, Alberta, Canada.
- Glaciers at College Fiord, from a cruise ship, Prince William Sound, Alaska.
- Upper Mesa Falls on Henrys Fork of the Snake River, Idaho.
- A herd of bison (buffalo) in Jackson Hole, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
- Rhododenrons in the redwood forest, Redwood National Park, California.
- Cable cars on Nob Hill in San Francisco, California.
- Spring wildflowers at Mission San Antonio, Monterey County, California
- Highway 50, the "Loneliest Road in America", near the Nevada/Utah line.
- Patio de los Campañas at Tlaquepaque, Sedona, Arizona.
- Bamboo forest in Oheo Gulch, Halea
- View more panoramas from Don Bain's 'Top 40' Sampler

Related Articles:
- 'An Interview with World Wide Panorama Organziers'

dbain[at]virtualguidebooks[dot]com