We had an interesting conversation with Patrick, who was more than eager to talk – among several other things – about his past, his works and his future projects.

Can you tell us about your background – where you grew up, studied in school, your life between europe and Usa where you live now, etc.?

I was what they call an Army brat. My dad did a tour of duty in Viet Nam as a Special Forces doctor, then had a private practice in Cushing, Oklahoma. Cushing is/was a small town that had depended on the oil industry, in a state filled with small towns that depended on the oil industry for their survival.

I grew up with horses and cattle, tarantulas and tornados, and thought Oklahoma was the real American West (until I became an adult and moved to California which is actually wester).

I rode horses competitively as a kid, and my great-grandad tried to teach me how to make beef jerky and how to throw a rope. He did successfully teach me to read. I can remember watching as my dad and his buddies would train cutting horses in a makeshift corral.

At some point my folks divorced, and Mom and I moved to Virginia with her family. Mom remarried, and my step dad was career Army; the Army moved us around the American South, then to Gelnhausen, Germany for a 3-year stint.

We rented an apartment outside of Gelnhausen in the smaller town of Biebergemund. There were plenty of places for a kid to explore and play, both in town and in the forest behind our house. Also, each year there were motocross races which ran practically through our back yard -- heaven for a 10 year old boy.

Living off-base also gave me the chance to make German friends and speak German; of course, once we moved back to the States I quickly lost my German language skills.

Back Stateside, we lived in Southern Virginia for several years, and then in my senior year of high school I moved back to Oklahoma for a while. I graduated, then started college there, before moving back to Virginia. I attended community college off and on, but basically took a hiatus from higher education and entered the work force.

In Northern Virginia (just outside of Washington DC) I worked for a mom-and-pop custom picture framing business, and was there for about ten years. During this time, my mom and stepdad continued to move around with the Army, and I consider myself fortunate that I stayed in the States when they were stationed in Somalia. They were ultimately evacuated out by the Marines when civil war broke out in 1991.

How did you first became interested in photography?

Well, I wish I could say something like "my photographic career began at the age of 9, when my parents gave me a Rolleiflex -- I was hooked"... but that's not the case. ;-)

Working as a designer in the picture frame shop, I was exposed to all kinds of art and trained in the craft of preserving the image rather than the craft of creating the image. I was able to interact with my photographer clients, and learn from them the why or the how of a particular photograph we were going to preserve. Many times this was more interesting than the actual image, or served to add an intellectual depth not readily apparent.

Our clients ranged from the individual, to museums, to government entities such as the Bureau of Land Management. I got to work with some top-notch photography.

In 1996 I began to work only part time, and pursued undergraduate studies full time at George Mason University. Several art history & criticism courses there did get me hooked briefly on American art from the Sixties.

Ed Ruscha's "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" stuck with me; if you're not familiar with it, it's a fold-out photobook filled with successive frames (which end up as what we'd now call a "flat pano"). What "Every Building" lacks in composition it makes up for in production and descriptive value -- its title says exactly what it is.

Another artist who came out of the Sixties was Chuck Close. Most of his work is extremely large scale, photorealistic portraiture. When I saw an exhibit of his at the Hirshorn (in DC), I was beginning to get hooked. :-) As impressive as his large pieces are, though, what really blew me away were his small holograms tucked away in a dark little passway. You really got a feel for his self-portraits as being in a 3-D space.

In either case, both artists were working within an idea of the grid -- Ruscha's was maybe accidental in his simple series of frames, but Close's super exact gridding technique spoke to my inner slightly obsessive-compulsive being. At this point I still hadn't picked up a camera seriously -- although at some point during college my Dad gave me a Sony Mavica digital camera, which recorded images to floppy disk. I was still beginning to get hooked.

Around 1998 I joined the team of the student run newspaper at GMU. My job was to redesign and maintain the paper's Web site, which I did until I finished school in 2000. Admittedly it wasn't the best looking site (my first, really), but it worked and I had it updated with every story twice a week (until then I guess the students had updated it only a few times a semester). Working for the paper also let me play with and learn on cool things like Flash 3, Photoshop 5 and a shiny row of Power Mac G3s. Both my Mac Performa and my Gateway PC paled in comparison to those G3s. :-)

At any rate, up to this point I was still just working with other people's photography (in the frame shop), and using other folks' photos as fodder for my own conceptual art, or for use in my self-published poetry 'zine "eccentricity". Using Flash 3 and one of those G3s I was able to explore displaying typography in an animated (permuted) fashion, a la the grid.

That same thinking (permuting a set of words through all its possible combinations) led to a Polaroid piece of mine which was displayed at "Gimme Polaroid IV" in San Francisco in December of 2003.

I took 96 SX-70 Polaroids of mine, and re-photographed them with a Coolpix camera; then I arranged them in a grid, each image at actual size and associated with one word from a set of words. The arrangement was then permuted through the possible combinations. Fun, but laborious to do. This is the same Coolpix camera which began CheathamLane's panoramic VR career.

How did you become interested in VR photography? Was there anyone in particular that influenced you to choose this particular path in photography?

I had had a quick introduction to QuickTime Pro and LiveStage Pro while working at a Mac tech company in San Francisco. We were tapped by Apple to give one of the QuickTime Pro seminars -- and I was tapped to figure it all out. ;-) I think the seminar used LiveStage Pro version 2. A combination of stage fright and the flu got me through giving half a seminar, and that was my initiation to both interactive QuickTime and public speaking.

Back in 2001 I was living with my soon-to-be wife, Maura Lane. I had recently stopped work as a Mac tech, and vowed to myself I would work only freelance or for my own company in the future. I was taking graduate courses in Linguistics at San Francisco State, and was a bit "between jobs".

Maura was working as a freelance styling assistant for Gap Photo, taking courses in 3D modeling and the like, and interning at DVGarage in San Francisco. DVGarage was introducing people to QTVR and QTVR photography -- probably a la Greg Downing and Eric Blanpied, though I had no idea who they were at the time.

Maura was really excited by QTVR, and invited me along on a DVG shooting field trip. I think we went to a brewing company/restaurant in the Mission District of San Francisco, where the interior and architecture were interesting. I was hooked!

The idea of stitching multiple stills really jibed with my natural tendency towards the grid. The artistic possibilities for this kind of photography seemed limitless, or at the least only bound by my own creativity.

Maura and I began exploring ways in which we could create QTVR and maybe get paid for it -- and museums and art galleries came immediately to mind. One of the first panoramas we shot together was down at The Rotunda, near the Exploratorium in San Francisco. CheathamLane was born!

In between researching VR panoramas & shooting gear and testing delivery methods, I began to assist other traditional photographers in their work. While I'm a big fan of RTFM, and of deep study of whatever interests me -- but admittedly not formally schooled in photography -- I'm also of the mind that there is no replacement for real-world experience. I'm lucky in that my closest friends are all professional shooters (and each with a different focus and style). On the other hand, I have to keep on my toes with my friends; maybe it's both a blessing and a curse.

Maura and I quickly learned that shooting and selling VR photography isn't the best way to get rich quick. ;-) Maura went back to full time work, but supported me as I tried to make a 'go' of VR Photography; She still supports CheathamLane by keeping its books straight, and filling in on the odd styling or post-production gig.

I began to take the odd Web site or coding job, and continued assisting other photographers, limiting my assisting pool to photographers I knew. The on-the-job shooting experience is like no other: it can be frantic and stressful, but totally rewarding.

Loading film and placing lights for other photographers isn't the most glamorous thing to do, but with the right photographer it can be richly educational. Once I got comfortable with loading and tracking film under pressure, I was able to soak in the rest of the experience.

Since I already knew the photographer I was working for, there was a bit of a comfort level there. I think that there was a readiness to share knowledge and experience that may not have been available to a 'stranger assistant'. All this time I kept pursuing panoramic jobs, and interacting within the VR community.

When someone I knew -- a "straight shooter" -- told me that VR Photography wasn't "real" photography, I knew I was not only _really_ hooked, but I was in for the long haul. I prefer seeing possibility where others see a dead-end.

Whose panoramic work do you admire, and why?

Whew, too many to mention! I won't be coy though and leave it at that... I truly admire Michael Shaff and Matthew Peterson. They may not be best known for their panoramic work, but they are daily influences because of how they visualized the use of VR -- not just interactively (computer-based), but also in print and in theory. Someone who takes it further _and_ shoots would be Aldo Hoeben; He's kind of the unsung renaissance man of VR (at least in the Americas, Aldo!).

Shooters? That becomes a wide pool of talent. :) I am envious of people like Jook Leung, Gilles Vidal and Andras Frenyo who can shoot people-filled scenes nearly flawlessly and seemingly without effort -- "panoreportage". Mad geniuses like Ian Wood who can quickly innovate both shooting methods and shooting devices drive me, well, mad because I feel like I can't keep up. Ian Wood may be the genius who can bring the redheaded stepchild that is VR photography into the fine art realm -- I think he has the eye and the ability to create some really spectacular imagery.

I'm also currently very impressed with Markus Krueger's installation piece. I think it's called "Arminius Monument". Basically, Markus shot a panoramic of the inside of the top of a larger-than-life-sized statue so that what we end up with is the interior view of the statue's head.

He then took the full spherical panoramic and outputted it to cube faces, something like 6' per cube face. The cube faces were then assembled into a sort of viewing room, so you get the feeling of being actually inside the head of the statue. Very, very cool, especially considering you enter the installation from ground level.

Editors note: click here to view the VRMAG article in this issue about "Die Quadratur des Kopfes - squaring the head of Hermann".

Greg Downing does great work - it approaches the level of sharpness and clarity (and dimension!) which I want to approach. Where Greg (and xRez) document large landscapes and urbanscapes via large-scale panoramas, I'm interested in documenting the interior or private space in large-scale. Sort of a surprise-of-the-mundane, if you will. I wish I had access to Greg's camera gear and processing power.

There are a ton of people taking panoramic VR images, who simply post them on their own sites, or labor in obscurity -- from time to time I come across something online that just blows me away. It's nice to be blown away sometimes by images from someone whose name I don't know. It's also nice to be reminded that there are several billion other people on this planet, some of whom don't interact on the same email lists I do.

What are you most passionate about within the realm of VR photography?
Concerning community activities, do u want to talk about your job as director of the IVRPA, the quarterly meetings you organize in the bay area, and the 2007 International VR Photography Conference in Berkeley ?

Somewhere along CheathamLane's trajectory, I became active and involved on various discussion lists. From the venerable QTVR discussion list to the LiveStage Pro discussion list, to other online panorama communities.

I enjoy the problem-solving aspect of this type of photography we do, and in those online communities I enjoy trying to help other folks in much the same way people helped me when I was a newbie.

The first VR Summit I attended was the one held in Sedona, Arizona. This was the first time I'd put names to faces for a lot of other VR photographers and developers. It was a very cool experience.
Click here to view panoramas of the Sedona Summit 2004.

So, I thought I could continue to give back to this niche VR Photography community by trying out for the Board of directors for the IVRPA in 2005. I took a year off in 2006, then nominated myself for 2007 and was again voted in by the membership.

2007 has been a busy year for the IVRPA. Thanks to the Aldo Hoeben powerhouse, the IVRPA has a new Web site, with all sorts of forum, search, gallery and blogging capabilities for IVRPA members. This year also saw the first annual IVRPA International VR Photography Conference in Berkeley, fully hosted and managed by the IVRPA.

click here to view Berkeley conference group pano by Jook Leung

All the Board pulled together to make the Conference a reality, but it would really have been a bust if it hadn't been for Don Bain's efforts, along with Landis & Kat Bennett and myself. Of course, without further assistance from Bob Fisher, other IVRPA board and general members (too many to name & thank all at once!), and the Sponsors, the show couldn't have gone on.

The Conference also debuted the IVRPA Panoramic Photography Contest, which was a huge success. Pilar Law from Conference sponsor Pictopia took charge of printing and mounting the winning entries from the contest, and she was really excited by the response. The Contest was my baby, for the most part, and I had a fear that there wouldn't be interest, and that I'd have to submit some images myself under pseudonym. ;-) When it turned out there were around 300 entries, I was totally enthused.

Like the previous VR Summits in Sedona and Savannah, the main thing I think people took from the IVRPA Conference was a fuller sense of being part of a community of like-minded folks. The sessions and seminars were superbly informative and interesting, but nothing beats being able to throw ideas around the dinner table, face-to-face with people you admire or respect.

2008 will probably see an IVRPA presence at Photokina. I'll definitely try to make that!

I'll take a year off from the Board of the IVRPA in 2008, so I can focus on business building and other pursuits. I think the 'new face' of the IVRPA on the Web, and general momentum from the Conference will help propel other IVRPA members into the spotlight on the Board. I'll still reserve the right throw peanuts at the Board from the general members' section in the peanut gallery.

You offer professional services through your website, Cheathamlane.net
– can you give us an idea of the demand for VR services in your area?
What services you offer ? How do you advertise your services?

I'm lucky to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. There's a lot of built in support for photographers in general, with rental studios and camera shops large and small (Calumet, or my favorite Looking Glass in Berkeley).

Of course with Apple Inc.'s headquarters being so close, this area is also a bit of a hotbed of VR Photography action & shooters. All this means that there are resources generally available here that may not be so ready at hand in other areas. What this also means is that there's more competition here than there may be elsewhere. That's OK though, because it keeps us photographers honest.

CheathamLane's focus has never been solely on the photography aspect of VR. I have always tried to marry the photography with the interactivity, and that means I've kept my chops up with things like QuickTime and Flash scripting, and more general Web coding. It helps that I have a fairly good design sense.

So, I may be inherently more marketable in the photographic VR arena than other shooters who "just" shoot. Actually, a fair amount of my work has been for other photographers -- whether they're brand new to stitched panoramas & I'm consulting on the shooting or delivery, or they're an established photographic VR company with design/delivery needs outside their skill set.

I provide, through CheathamLane, pretty much all services a client might need. I produce shoots from the ground up; from the VR shooting and post-production, to creation of full virtual tours in QuickTime and/or Flash and their delivery on the Web, disc or other media. If a project's too large for one person, or there's a need for design skills above my own, then I tap into my network of professionals. I keep a good relationship with a small number of talented people here in the Bay Area, but there's no shortage of talent near San Francisco should the need arise.

I guess, for people who like grocery lists filled with buzzwords, I'd list out CheathamLane's services like so: Interactive 360° panoramic photography, 360° product rotation photography, still photography, custom Web site and interactive marketing design & development, with specialties ranging from Virtual Tours to Product Rotations (Object VR) to Flash and QuickTime animation and scripting. I also create user interface solutions for complex information navigation issues (problem solving!).

At the very least, I find it imperative that I have at least a more than basic understanding of most of the technologies (software/hardware) and interface issues that might arise for a given project. This allows me to, if not solve an issue or innovate an answer outright, pro-actively research it or find the person who can.

I was recently having a conversation with a client who let me know that before they settled on me for the job, they had been told that what they wanted couldn't be done. That kind of thinking baffles me. I rarely think "something can't be done" but rather think "that might be kinda difficult to do". I guess it's in my nature to be a glass-is-half-full person. Anything is possible!

2007 was supposed to be CheathamLane's "year to market". I had plans for printed material, Web campaigns and so on. But then, I got extremely busy. ;-) Up to this point, all my work has been through referral, word of mouth, the odd Web search. And, up to this point, not all my work had been directly VR panorama related. This year, every single client and project has revolved (ahem) around VR photography and/or interactivity.

I think that "virtual tour" and "360° photography" have entered the vernacular. Also, computing power (hardware/software) is cheaper, faster and stronger than ever before. This enables more people (importantly, the potential client) to view our VR photography interactively and at higher resolutions than in the past.

Recent innovations and updates within Adobe Flash and other packages, and the availability of viewing APIs help a wider audience view interactive photographic VR, and I think that photo VR may almost have hit the mainstream. I get more inquiries from both potential clients and other traditional photographers than ever before.

The new IVRPA site, and my interaction on it (in the forums and through my 'blog there), has helped several clients to find me and reach out. Definitely, a perk of being an IVRPA member is being easily searchable. 2007 is a good, busy year for CheathamLane, so 2008 may be my "year to market".

Recently you created some very nice projects such as San Francisco
Conservatory of Music Virtual Tour,
A&E's reality show Sons of Hollywood with an interesting implementation of Utube videos in a VR,
the job for the Smithsonian / National Air and Space Museum and your scripting projects
do you want to talk about them ?

I kept in touch with Dennis Biela, after interacting with him at the past Summits, and helping out at both Sedona and Savannah Summits. He has an ongoing project for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, documenting all their air- and spacecraft.

The Smithsonian NASM had a grant-based project, to create an interactive learning module geared towards kids, and they were using Director to wrap Dennis's VR of cockpits into a fuller presentation. At that time, and during their project's crunch time of course, there were some quirky bugs with Director's QuickTime Xtra extension (having to do with QuickTime updates, I think).

Dennis put them in touch with me, and I ended up creating and scripting an entire QuickTime-based quiz, using NASM's graphics and layout, and all the QTVR of the cockpits. In talking with NASM's Director programmer, he let slip that he had no idea about all the interactivity and wiring you can do directly within QuickTime. They were impressed and pleased with the final product, which they were able to embed whole into their Director presentation.

Mid-2006, I was sent down to Los Angeles to photograph the set of a reality TV show -- "Sons of Hollywood" -- by A&E Television Networks. I brought Robert Fisher in to assist, and we spent a long day shooting inside. I got there before sunrise, so I could catch the outside view to downtown Los Angeles; I shot it, but the fog -- I mean, smog -- never lifted.

Catching other outdoor views during the day was difficult, too, because I was having to duck the hired gun in the helicopter who was getting film or video footage of the house exterior, and cars, etc. I'd wait for the sound of the helicopter's blades to fade, then jet outside and shoot, then get back inside.

It was good to see Bob, and I got to visit the Southern California Macintosh Museum (Bob's office) and head to a local Middle Eastern joint for dinner.

For the A&E gig, I simply provided the QTVR files, full resolution spherical TIFs & still photography. They completed the interactive tour in-house, using Flash. I was a little let down when I saw the completed tour at the show's fansite, and realized they were using the flat cylinders and simply dragging them back and forth on the screen.

That said though, what they did with hotspots and overlays in conjunction with Pier 1 Imports' product placement is very nice. I've since placed some of the fullscreen panoramas from that shoot at my own site. I found some YouTube video related to Sons of Hollywood, and embedded it into a Flash presentation of my own. I hope a fan or two of the show (which was cancelled almost immediately, I think) enjoy the perspective-correct pans.

More recently I was approached by Alex Brose of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and asked to produce a virtual tour of SFCM's new facility near the Civic Center in San Francisco. The building is immense and newly redone. The performance spaces are especially spectacular; The Concert Hall kept much of the original ornate Victorian architecture, and expanded and updated it to be a world class acoustic space.

Alex's objective was to provide the tour to prospective students, as a way for them to visit the location from remote -- many of their students come from the farthest reaches of the globe.

I shot the performance spaces at pretty high resolution (24mm lens on the Canon 5D), and used a 15mm for the rest of the locations at 50 Oak Street. The Concert & Recital halls and the Salon make for very nice printed pieces, above and beyond the interactive screen-based viewing experience. SFCM and I are exploring the possibilities of print usage; I'm excited, especially after seeing a 2' by 6' print of the main Recital Hall -- which was printed by Pictopia for use during the IVRPA Conference in Berkeley.

SFCM is delivering the tour via QTVR on their Web site, and I used their tour set as a test bed for some forays into Flash delivery (a la Flash Panorama Player):

click here to view flash demo

For the QTVR delivery, they worked the QTVR into their own site design, but I provided a full screen set of pages for them too -- including spinControl:VR and audio of course.

Editors note: view VRMAG article "spinControl for novice QTVR users".

In late 2006 I began work on an Object VR project for Bone Clones, Inc., based near Los Angeles. Bone Clones® create high quality replicas of bones, both modern and from the fossil record. My job for this project was to document, in 360°, 32 of their fossil hominid skulls and to provide a delivery method for the rotations - to include other graphic and textual information.

I brought in my friend & colleague Kevin Berne to manage lighting tech for the products. Kevin Berne, Le Mello & myself all ended up performing the post-production of the photos.

Ultimately we shot each skull along both the horizontal and vertical axes, for a total of 72 frames per skull. Kevin and I innovated a mount for the skulls, which allowed us to photograph them without having to move the camera or any of the other lighting gear or backdrop. I'd been given the go-ahead to drill a small mounting hole in each skull which made life a lot easier.

If we'd been shooting a "true" multi-row object, mounting and camera placement would have been more difficult. To mount and rotate the skulls, we used a tripod and extended it to nearly full height. We attached a crossbar to the tripod, and fixed my indexed Bogen 303 head to this (pointing toward the ground). We used a standard hex plate to attach "The Gizmo" to the head. I had to 'crack' the Bogen head a bit, to get the center of the plate mount as close as possible over the center of rotation.

The Gizmo was a hex plate, with threaded plumbing pipe epoxied to it. at the end of the pipe (which got successively narrower toward the top) we attached a small eyescrew which we wrapped in black tape. This eyescrew screwed in to the small mounting hole on the top of each skull. So, we used gravity to keep things level, and each skull ended up hanging about 6 feet above the floor from the crossbar.

I set the Bogen head to 10 degrees between stops, and away we went. We'd start, for continuity's sake, with each skull facing camera. After 36 horizontal frames, we'd remove the skull from the Gizmo, rotate it (still face forward) 90° clockwise, and reattach it to the Gizmo at that orientation. We'd shoot these 36 frames, then move to the next skull.

In post, after dropping out the skulls from the background, it was a simple rotate action in Photoshop that made the 90° series of frames vertical again. After some scripting in Flash, it appears that the skull is moving vertically through a full rotation.

After post-production of the photography, the next phase was to create a fully interactive Player to showcase the replicas. The project has gone through several phases and growth spurts, but is finally ready to go live on November 28.

I created a Flash-based delivery, which allows the user to rotate the skull along either axis using a mouse; there are also spinControl-like buttons to facilitate rotation and auto-rotation. The user can zoom in or out of the photo (even while rotating); Once zoomed in, the skull can be dragged around the window to center focus on a particular feature of the replica.

There is always textual information a button click away, and a scale reference image can be displayed and dragged by the user for comparison of the replica to that of a modern human skull. I contracted Kat Bennett of 360Geographics to create a set of map images, and so each skull has a related geographical reference as well.

Aside from the rotation, there is an entire pane devoted to showcasing each skull in the series. Once viewing the series pane, the user can cycle through still images of each replica, and access the textual description for each -- and when ready, load the interactive rotation of each skull into the main pane.

The interactive Player is compiled out to both APP and EXE; There may be plans for Web delivery but a date is TBD. This is one of those projects which grew to become its own thing; the interactive Player is complex far beyond the original objective.

I've also done some shooting this year for PR and Ad agencies. Grant, Scott and Hurley in San Francisco was looking to revitalize the Noah's Bagels Web site, and came to CheathamLane to produce 360° photography/animation of a Noah's brown paper bag. Kevin Berne covered lighting, and Le Mello was the "bag stylist".

Le and I worked together to come up with ways to animate the bag's movement, beyond the regular 360° rotation. We needed to slowly have the bag crumple, controllably, and capture the crumpling frame by frame. Fishing line and painter's tape to the rescue! We did a little ad-libbing during the shoot, naturally, but pretty much came up with a Bag Crumple Storyboard beforehand and stuck to it during the shoot.

GSH ended up doing al the post-production in house. I don't envy that person's job. ;-) The images are good, but there were quite a few frames shot for the animation, and it's a laborious task.

Most recently I photographed more Product Rotations, this time for Audreybag (a project created by Audrey Hepburn's family, with all proceeds going to the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund). The site and showcase went live on November 5.

Jessica Z. Diamond, the Hepburn Estate archivist, came up from Los Angeles to art direct, and Kevin Berne tackled lighting tech. We were all impromptu stylists. The different textures and surfaces on the handbags posed their own issues with lighting and so on; each Italian handmade audreybag is a mix of printed cotton canvas, leather and brass.

What advice would you offer those considering entering the VR photography field as professionals?

Oh, the usual Zen stuff I suppose. ;-)

I think taking the "can do" approach, rather than the "that's too difficult" one goes a long way, both for the job at hand and for customer service. Strive to capture the best image possible, always. Don't undersell your talents -- and don't underestimate them either. That said, know when to hire help -- you can't do everything yourself.

Always be respectful, even when in competition. Never, never, ever enter into the "Mac vs Win" or "Nikon vs Canon" debate. Return all calls and answer all emails. Refer business to Patrick Cheatham whenever possible. ;-)

One thing which has become very important to me is being able to interact with other professionals in the field, whether it's through the IVRPA, PanoTools NG or some other photographers' forum. It's fulfilling and helpful to be able to both give & receive advice, war stories or real world experience. I hope that anyone new to VR Photography will seek out these venues and take part in the community and discussions. I also hope I can follow all the advice I just gave. :-)

What VR equipment and software do you use and recommend?

At one point or another, I've used just about every panorama head and stitching software known to Man. I've currently settled on the Canon 5D, with the Canon 15mm, 24mm or 50mm depending on the shoot or mood. I keep my Fuji S2 and Nikon 10.5mm as a backup, or rent a second body just in case.

PTGui Pro is my main workhorse for stitching and outputting flat/spherical files and I keep Realviz Stitcher as a secondary. I use Phase One's Capture One Pro for image capture and RAW conversion. Once my spherical renders are touched up in Photoshop, I use Cubic Converter to output cube faces (if I'm using cube faces) and I go from there to QuickTime or Flash delivery. I spend as little time as possible in Photoshop, and as much time on-camera as possible.

I have 2 360 Precision heads -- the Absolute, and the new Adjuste which I just purchased; also the Bogen 303, and a Kaidan spherical head. The Kaidan head is what Maura and I bought back in the first days of CheathamLane. It's still perfectly serviceable, but has taken a beating. The Bogen 303 is really only good for cylinder shooting, and is heavy to boot; besides, I cracked it open during the Bone Clones shoot and it just hasn't been the same since.

I'm really impressed with the Nodal Ninja, and may slide one of those in my kit soon. I'm also excited to be receiving a beta of the Gigapan head, which will mostly automate the shooting of (potentially) gigapixel+ panoramas from smaller digital point and shoots.

Anyone who knows me knows I tend to carry the heaviest tripod known to Man... It's not like I'm climbing the Matterhorn or something. Friends and colleagues can rejoice, as JetBlue's baggage handlers put the kibosh on my tripod, on a recent flight from Oakland to NYC. The legs are permanently half-extended now, and inoperable otherwise. Upon my request JetBlue is going to pay for repair/replacement of my tripod.

At any rate, if you're looking for a sturdy tripod which can handle just about any camera/head combination (not just VR gear) the Bogen 3251 is great... but if you want a sensible, light tripod for VR I might recommend something else.

Do you have plans for interesting projects on the horizon?

This year CheathamLane partnered with Lightspeed Media, and we've been prototyping for a project called the Pocket Ranger. The Pocket Ranger project will be underwritten by the National Parks Foundation and the National Park Service.

Pocket Ranger's goal is to empower the National Park visitor (and potential visitor) to bring the interpretive elements of a specific Park home with them -- and enable them to take the Park 'on the road', using iPod and/or iPhone. In the end, a person will be able to download content related to any National Park.

Once the content (VR and still photography, HD video, text, audio and so on) is downloaded, the user can view and interact with the content from their desktop via Pocket Ranger's custom interface/application. The Pocket Ranger will also allow the user to configure their own 'tour', so that if someone wants to they can take their iPod on the trails and have access to information which augments their experience. Obviously, nothing beats a real live Park Ranger... but since there can't be a Ranger assigned personally to each Park visitor: Pocket Ranger.

We've already begun documenting the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. In January of 2008 we'll gather content at one or two more National Parks and get our team and workflows in place. From there we'll spiral out and ultimately document each location within the National Park Service.

This is an exciting project, and I'm personally very pleased to be a part of something that helps further the mission of the National Park Service.

Another project which will move forward in 2008 is the Virtual American Revolution. It should be released in spring '08 as an educational DVD, chock full of VR photography, stills, maps, and historical information about the American Revolution.

Carlton Soohoo of Panospin Studios in Massachusetts has already captured most of the photographic VR content. I'll be providing programming for interactivity and delivery, and working with Panospin's graphic designer along the way. View Virtual American Revolution web site.

Want to take a stab at predicting where VR photography will be ten
years from now? What developments would you like to see occur?

Ha, ten years from now? I don't think I'm very good at predictions...

I think VR Photography will be accessible almost invisibly at the consumer level, and that the consumer will also be the producer -- whether with a cell phone camera or a DSLR.

Right now what's really hot is combining VR photography with geolocation information. There's a lot of competition in this area, from Google to earthmine and others. As the technologies get better and more interesting, the possibilities will too. We're already seeing the arbitrary info-tagging of still and VR photography, and as we move ahead as a hypervisual world this will become very powerful.

I'm secretly an artist, and I hope to see VR photography used more in the fine arts arena. Not just for simple documentation, but as an expressive element. I have some plans for an online collaborative effort, and I hope I can spearhead it in 2008. I'll keep you posted!

Links:
Cheathamlane.net

Polaroid piece
Sedona Summit 2004
IVRPA International VR Photography Conference in Berkeley
Pictopia
Sons of Hollywood
Perspective-correct pans
SFCM web site
Kevin Berne
Grant, Scott and Hurley
Audreybag
Virtual American Revolution web site

Previous articles about Patrick Cheatham:
THE CANVAS MOVES ONLINE - EXISTENTIAL ARTIST DAVID MAXIM
SPIN CONTROL FOR NOVICE QTVR USERS
MINI VIRTUAL TOUR OF BOSTON
SUMMIT IN SEDONA KICKS OFF