Award-winning panorama photographer Jook Leung hiked the awareness of virtual reality to a new level this week with his interview on ABC’s digital cable news channels. The interview lasted an impressive 14 minutes, opening with panoramas from his New Years Eve in Times Square series, followed by a demonstration of his camera and 8mm fisheye lens and wrapping up with panoramic prints.After a producer at ABC News noticed Jook’s New Year’s Eve at Times Square pano on www.panoramas.dk, Jook was invited to do an interview on the technology show, ‘Ahead of the Curve’. The interview aired Monday, January 17th, over ABC’s News Now network on local digital cable news channels and was also simulcast on their website.
If you missed it, the full interview (17MB) is available in QuickTime format, courtesy of Willy Kaemena. Jook also made a panorama of the ABC News Now taping during a commercial break.
Jook did a great job, even though it often seemed that the news anchor jumped in too quickly with the next question, cutting off his answers at times.
“The interview was taped in two 7-minute segments, all in one take,” Jook reports. “There was no rehearsing or multiple takes so what I said was it. At times I felt I got lost in what I was saying because I was nervous. When the ABC news anchor, Nancy Weiner, asked me an unexpected question all my speaking notes went out the window.”
Towards the end of the interview, Jook showed some of his hyperbolic panorama prints of the Rockefeller Center Ice Skating Rink and Grand Central Terminal, which were a big hit with everyone on set.
[Jook's hyperbolic images are hyperbolic projections derived from the equirectangular files he uses to create his spherical panoramas. It's an exciting way to squeeze the visual content of a 360 by 180 degree spherical panorama into the confines of a flat two-dimensional print. Jook uses a Photoshop plug-in called Flexify from Flaming Pear Software to explore these possibilities.]
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Jook Leung, he is a photographer who has consistently set milestones within the VR community. He came to panoramic photography after a 20-year successful career in traditional photography, doing advertising, corporate and editorial shoots. Jook’s work in VR was professionally rewarded with the 2003 Fujifilm Masterpiece Award in the Electronic Imaging category for his haunting “Tribute In Light” panorama, which generated much fanfare and accolades when it was first shown in full screen format on Hans Nyberg’s www.panoramas.dk.
Jook employs what he calls a “Guerrilla VR” style in his personal work, using his body as a monopod and his trained eye to rotate the lens around one point in space, allowing him to shoot without an encumbering tripod. This style allows him to capture moments much as a photojournalist does. Leung: “Shooting good candid VR photography is very challenging. You have to get very close to the scene if not right in the middle of it and quickly take your shots and get out. Jim Galvin, another VR photographer, saw me use a rolled-up sheet of poster paper for a monopod and called my approach ‘Guerrilla VR’.”
Related Articles:
- ’A Conversation with Award-winning Tribute in Light VR Photographer Jook Leung’
- ’WTC – A Tribute in Light’
