Color - A World Wide Panorama
18-23 September 2008

In the days surrounding the September 2008 equinox, photographers around the world will participate in another World Wide Panorama. The exact date of the equinox is 22 September 2008, 15:44 UTC.

The previous events have created a showcase of VR photography, with over 4500 panoramas by 920 photographers from more than 70 countries. The World Wide Panorama represents everyone in the VR community, from first-timers to professional photographers.

Please join us for the next World Wide Panorama event! (More about the theme)

The World Wide Panorama is sponsored by the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley. This site is hosted by The Geo-Images Project. This is a non-commercial project, done simply to create enthusiasm for VR photography, and provide an outlet for our collective creativity.

All images will be copyright by the individual photographers. Use in any way other than viewing on this web site is prohibited unless permission is obtained from the relevant photographer. If you're interested in using a panorama, be it for non-profit or commercial purposes, please contact the individual photographer. The WWP can neither negotiate for, nor speak on behalf of its participants. The overall site is copyright by the Regents of the University of California.

• The usual guidelines on format, dimensions, and files sizes will apply. Refer to the section on Rules.
• Photography must be done between 18-23 September and must be related to the theme of "Color".
• The preparation server will be open for contributions and editing from 18 September to 3 October 2008. It will then be closed for final editing. You can request your own account/profile page on the server during this period.
• The final site will be made public on 5 October 2008.
• Open to all panoramic photographers. We don't want to exclude anyone who wants to join in, or to miss a potentially great panorama by a new entrant. So, welcome all - spread the word and bring a friend.
• To get started we ask that you join our group and get on the mailing list. Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wwp/ and sign up. You don't need to be registered on the Yahoo group to participate in the event, but it is a good way to keep up with what's going on.

More information:

Rules and Restrictions

Dimensions and File Sizes

How to Upload and Edit

VR Photography Resources

Although all submissions that meet the technical and content requirements will most likely be accepted, the organizers reserve the right to refuse any individual submission.

About the Theme - Color

The theme for this World Wide Panorama Equinox event is Color. We offer the theme as a challenge, a source of inspiration, and to bind together our individual efforts into a collaborative whole.

As always, you are free to interpret the theme in any way you wish. You can take it literally and photograph a brightly multi-colored subject, or creatively and illustrate an obscure or metaphorical meaning of the term. Just be sure to write a caption that explains your subject and its relation to the theme.

The following essay was written by Caroling Geary and Yuval Levy, both well-known in the world wide panorama community.

Everything about color is relative. We can't pin it down but we can suggest it. We live in a world of constantly changing light that projects or reflects vibrations that we perceive as color. Individual perception of color varies. Capturing color and transmitting it to others with our technology is a tricky and unsure process. Color names are not precise so we use numbers (hexadecimal notation).

Color can work with many of the theme suggestions. For example, someone suggested Elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. Think of the colors of those elements and how they might appear singly or together in a panorama. For example, red lava flowing into aqua water.

The Irish leprechaun's secret hiding place for his pot of gold is said to be at the end of the rainbow, an optical and meteorological phenomena that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky as a multicolored arc with red on the outer edge and violet on the inner edge when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere.

Humans perceive this tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, from 400 (red) to 790 (violet) teraherz through the eye, differentiating wave lengths as colors. In contrast with the audbile portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (20 Hz - 20 kHz), we can not directly emit signals in this spectrum. But we have created colored lights.

Reflected color is an illusion. When we say green paint, we mean that the paint's chemical structure absorbs red rays from white light and reflects green. If we shine blue light on the green paint we get something else. So color photography is intimately bound up with lighting. The white point is important, whether matching fluorescent or incandescent light bulbs or overcast sunlight.

To use the color spectrum humans have invented all sorts of techniques. With chemical processes we extract natural pigments or create artificial ones and create paint to add color in our lives. We use electric processes to reproduce color on ever bigger, faster, brighter and more detailed displays.

We try to calibrate the displays so each person sees the same color, but there are many variables. Color blindness is one.

We use color as a mean of distinction. We wear our team's colors when we go to the stadium and we are proud of our national colors, reflected in our flags. We choose our car's color and coat our homes with colors that we like. Sometimes we are limited in our choices, like on the Caribbean island of Curacao where on April 22, 1817 a governor prohibited the use of white paint for houses due to sun glare bouncing off the walls hurting his eyes.

Naturally the sky is blue and vegetation is green. Nature uses color sometimes to blend in like a chameleon and sometimes to stand out like colorful mushrooms and animals that indicate to potential predators: "beware, I'm poisonous!".

We do the same, sometimes blending in with a military camouflage pattern or with gray suits in a city, and sometimes standing out, with dyed hair, painted nails and body, colorful dresses.

Cultures attach conventional meanings to color. The universal phenomenon of mourning a death is associated with black in the west, yellow in Egypt, red in South Africa and white in Japan and the far east. Readers of this essay can find more different cultural uses of color for the same phenomenon.

Colors are used to encode information. Traffic lights are by convention red and green all over the world but other traffic signs differ. Speed limits in Europe are surrounded by a red circular border like all other signs indicating a prohibition, while in North America they are simply white panels with the number painted in black.

Technically, evolution has been a one way street to expand the availability of colors, including the introduction of color film, color TV, the invention of blue LED and the expansion of the color gamut of current and future displays.

Artists do not limit themselves to this one way. Sometimes monochromatic or black and white images can feel more colorful than oversaturated or intensely-colored ones. That is in the sense of visual drama. Also artists use afterimages and knowledge of how colors affect each other for emphasis.

VR photography pushes the dynamic range of color to its limits. The envelope is still being pushed, with the latest trends being high dynamic range imaging and, very recently fusion processess for exposure blending.

We are confident that the next WWP event will push the envelope of colors in all directions, artistic and technical, showing diverse facets of this colorful world and our colorful imaginations.

About Themes
We expect our themes to do several things. Some participants view them as a challenge – they go to great lengths to find and execute the most perfect and challenging expression of the theme. That is great, and we have had some amazing examples of this – the epitome of the theme.

Others of us simply need some ideas, a few suggestions to get our creativity engine running. Theme essays such as this suggest a lot of possibilities, plus most people as they read will think of more. Discussion of the theme on the WWP list is encouraged – share your ideas, spur each other on, help each other out. It’s a collaboration, not a competition.

Sometimes that brilliant idea you originally had turned out to be too hard, or impossible, or illegal. Or you didn’t have the time you needed. Or you’re a beginner and need a straightforward subject. The theme gives you a chance to shoot whatever you can, then tie it into the group endeavor with the caption.

Organizers

The World Wide Panorama events and web sites have been organized and created by Don Bain and Landis Bennett. They both participated in the early "Wrinkles" and maintain large web sites of their own panoramic images. Both are current or former members of the IVRPA (International VR Photography Association) board of directors. Original graphics by Kat Bennett and Markus Altendorff. Maps, database, and programming by Markus Altendorff. Thomas Rauscher, keeper of the coordinates. (More information about the organizers.)