Daniel M. German

I have a passion for photography, computer science and software development. My day-job is assistant professor in computer science at the University of Victoria, in Canada, but I spend most of my free time as an amateur photographer, and an open source software developer.

Digital photography has started to merge these three passions in ways that I never expected. One year ago I became a core contributor of Panotools. Most users of Panotools usually present their spherical panoramas using an immersive environment (such as Quicktime QTVR), but somehow the Stereographic Projection was being used with artistic purposes. The question was why only it?

This question lead me to the introduction of several new projections into Panotools and Hugin (which are described in a scientific paper submitted to the CaE Symposium). I also realized that I was not the only person working in this area. I met Seb, Lloyd, and Alexandre and discovered that they were all working on the same problems, pushing the envelop, finding innovative ways to present the sphere. Somehow the field of artistic flat panoramas was ready to be developed.

My daily photographic blog is http://silvernegative.com, and my general web site is http://turingmachine.org.

Technical Details

To photograph my panoramic images I use a Canon 20d, along several wide angle lenses: a Peleng 8mm Fisheye (kindly donated to me by the PanotoolsNG Mailing list), a Nikkor 10.5 2.8 Fisheye, and Canon EF-S 10-22. For panorama heads I use a Nodal Ninja NN3 and a Pinnacle VR (kindly provided to me Pinnacle VR).

I then use Panotools, hugin, enblend and Photoshop to create the equirectangulars, which in my opinion are the raw data of the sphere from which a projection artist can draw impossible views.

Two of the panoramas presented here are collaborative works with Seb and Alexandre. They kindly make available many of their equirectangulars of spherical panoramas via a Creative Commons license. As a researcher, software developer and artist they are of great value, as they allow me to experiment and learn beyond my own images.

I then use PTmender (part of panotools) to remap the images to their final projection.