Gaithersburg Fine Arts Association

"Spherical panoramas are ultra-wide photographs that cover all of the directions about a single point in space. They are often used in virtual reality applications, where the viewer can look around and see, for example, the entire layout of a room. Artistic applications also exist. In this talk, I will describe work I have done to display spherical panoramas as 2D art and as 3D sculpture. In the case of the 2D art, I consider the colors and shapes in a given scene as a palette, from which I use a highly distorted projection (what mathematicians call a stereographic projection) to create surrealistic impressions of the scene. For 3D sculpture, I map the panoramic image onto the surface of a geometric solid, creating an intriguing perspective on the scene."

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Artist statement

I have always been interested in photography and optics. As a career physicist, I specialize in studying how light interacts with materials and how one can learn about a material by the way it reflects or transmits light as a function of wavelength, direction, or polarization. As a photographic artist, I like to explore how lighting, color, and perspective affect how we perceive objects. I view the world with a unique sense of humor and, using my experience in physics and optics, try to put what I see in an interesting perspective. Viewing an object from a different vantage point gives us a different perspective, and often makes the object into something different than what we normally think of it as. Mixing two dissimilar and contrasting subjects in one image is a means to express drama, humor, and/or irony, and I like to explore this aspect of photography.