In the twenty years I’ve been making images I’ve visited and photographed a great many beautiful places.
There’s nothing I’d rather do than head out and document it: that’s how the passion became a job, and after twenty years a passion again. Over the years I’ve done it in all sorts of ways. Photography, video, drone, even analogue — and every combination in between. Each of those tools lets you capture a place beautifully and in your own way. And yet, however well you can do it with all of them, I often missed the “experience it like me” feeling. Actually standing there, looking around, taking it in. I can hear you thinking: come on Niko, just grab a 360° camera and shoot it that way.
Getting past the technical limits
And that’s exactly what I did, years ago. With the Ricoh 360 and the first Insta360 models, and it worked. The one bottleneck was that showing those images was limited to whatever the browsers could handle. Back then you could only put them on Facebook or a crappy Ricoh online viewer, complete with all the branding clutter those platforms bring. Embedding wasn’t really an option, or at least not in any way that looked good. I like to present everything I make the way I want it seen: with my own style and branding. So I lost interest fairly quickly, back then.
New tools, new solutions
With the recent career switch the steep learning curve of new technology and applications wasn’t the biggest step. I live on learning and growing, personally and technically. The real challenge was getting heavy, complex and rather less obvious files presented simply and digestibly. I wrestled with that for about four months: how do my clients get to see their results without installing extra software or having to train themselves up. Fortunately, with today’s server technology and tips from people who’ve been in the field longer, I started building my own client tools. And once those were working, it took little effort to carry them over to my personal tools — which is what you’re looking at and reading right now.
And so I developed a 360° viewer on my own platforms, where hotspots let you click through to other 360° images. You can do a proper walkthrough inside and out of locations, houses and so on; you can take screenshots, link to specific panoramas, embed them in websites or use the fullscreen viewer — all worked out neatly, in detail and future proof. It took a fair amount of code and research, but in the end it’s there. Ready to use, and easy with it.
I do love that.
You’ll find other examples at view.airscout.be, though that leans more towards work-specific files; the 360 viewer is only one of them. I won’t go into that here.
And since most 360° devices are now compact and easy to use, and even built into drones, you’ll be seeing this appear in my images more often. Next up, 360 video… 😉