About Mare Mater Matrice_841 ko
"MARE MATER MATRICE". A sculptor, friend of mine, named Philippe Guidau organized this underwater exhibition in the swimming pool of Luminy (university of Marseille). For a week people could come with their swimming suits to visit the exhibition. Mask and glasses were provided and the exhibition was a real success. I was very interested in QTVR at that time but never shot any pano before. To shoot the exhibition in QTVR would be the best way to keep a good record of the whole exhibition before it's gone. Even though it may seem a little crazy, I decided that my very first QuickTimeVR shooting would be this underwater exhibition. To shoot this pano I used a Nikonos V camera with a 28 mm and a (heavily loaded) tripod with a self made tilt head in order to have the nodal point in the right place, the usual stuff. Then I stayed underwater (only 3 meters) for about 90 minutes. I took a very long time to cautiously level the tripod since I couldn't really lay on the ground because of the net. Because of the great need for depth of field (narrow and remote objects) I had to set the aperture small, I shot two rounds of 18 images at f8 and f11 in order to be in "hyperfocus". When I do caving and cave diving shot, I like to experiment magnesium flash bulbs which provide a great deal of light while warming the ambiance. But, my custom made underwater remote trigger for the bulbs fucked up. Then I realized that the Nikonos was a great camera indeed, and such a stupid thing at the same time. Say, for that particular shooting, I needed a speed about 1/2 to 1/4 of a second, but on a Nikonos you CAN'T set manually the speed under 1/30 s !!! So I had the choice to go AUTO and trust the built-in light meter, or try to reproduce 36 times the same "drop" in time manually.The pictures appeared to be well exposed with some nice sunrays playing with the metal egg. Inevitably, two images facing directly the light were badly underexposed, which resulted in lots of unwelcome but interesting complications. The Ektas were scanned on a Lynotype and put to CD. And I processed them on a power book 3400c loaded with RAM (144 Mb). I believe all we "panographers" could share the end of the story together, these endless night in front of the computer, photoshoping , saving as..., optimizing again, and here comes a new version of whatever Tool, here you need those extensions, here conflict ?!? Restart ??? Hopefully, the magic of that "underwater" experience within the exhibition of Philippe Guidaukept me looking for the best results all along the process. Now I can share this peace of "Sacred World" with others.