These panoramas were shot on assignment for USA TODAY inside and around the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor.  The trek to the top of the statue, which has been closed since the 9/11 attacks, reopens to the public on July 4, 2009.

The last panorama, shot inside the crown of Lady Liberty, was the most technically difficult panorama that I have ever shot.  I knew beforehand that I wanted to allow viewers to see out of the windows.  After all, without the view from the top, the small room at the top is really quite uninteresting.  The exposure for the interior was about 1/2 second at f8.  The exterior was about 1/250.  Bracketing was obviously required so that I didn’t “blow out” the windows.  Because the camera lens was about 4 inches from the edge of the window at times, parallax became an issue, especially with the final shot required to complete the panorama:  The down shot, a.k.a., the nadir.

The video above is part of a six-part video interactive produced for USA TODAY that explores the life and legacy of Michael Jackson, as well as reactions from L.A., D.C., and N.Y.C..  View the interactive at www.mj.usatoday.com.  I’ll post more about this developing project soon.

Religious identities interactive

This interactive report produced for USA TODAY combines a data visualization and video to show the shifting religious trends in America.  USA TODAY received early access to research data that revealed that Catholics are fleeing the northeast for the south, a growing number of Americans identify themselves as having “no religion” and that more and more Americans are exploring new religions, like Wicca.  As the project’s producer, my role was to work with Flash design/developer William Couch and video journalists Rhyne Piggott, Garrett Hubbard, and Denny Gainer to create the interactive.  I shot video and photos in Charleston, S.C., where an increasing number of residents identify themselves as Catholic.  Click the image above to visit the project.

Earlier this week USA TODAY released a seven chapter documentary about the Inauguration of President Barack Obama. It was a very, very long week for everyone on the documentary team. For myself, the week included a night sleeping under a desk at the downtown Washington, D.C. office, multiple 12-13 hour work days, and a diet of roasted pecans and half a cup of water on Inauguration Day.

3D Photo Animations
I’ve been waiting for the right project to use a visual technique that I refer to as 3D photo animation. The concept also helped to drive home the theme of our project: To document the individual journeys to the inauguration as well as the journey that we, as one nation, have made in our history. The 3D fly-throughs were made using a single base image and cutting out multiple layers of foreground, middle ground, background in Photoshop. I added the layered Photoshop documents to Apple Motion, spread the layers apart in 3D space, and walked a camera through the digital scene. Textures and vignettes were also added in Apple Motion.

Steve Elfers, video director at USA TODAY, and I decided early on to not mix content from multiple images. The 3D animations allow the viewer to see the scene from an entirely possible perspective, had he/she been present in the photograph. The trick was to essentially hide each duplicated piece of the scene by flying the camera around and through foreground and middle ground elements. Without these limitations, the possibilities are endless in terms of 3D scene depth and layering. These ethics made the animations very difficult, but it was ultimately worth the trouble.

Canon 5D Mark II
This was my first major project using the Canon 5D Mark II as my primary video camera. The camera has so many positives that the negatives seem trivial. The image quality is astonishing. The flexibility is unparalleled. I was able to shoot HD video, still photographs and capture 360 panoramas using one camera. Last year, that would have required three cameras.

I used a Sennheiser transmitter and receiver combined with a Tram lav mic for all interviews and natural sound. While the audio is one of the major things holding this camera back, I found the combination of using the Senheisers and the Tram lav mic very acceptable. Obviously, the fact that the 5D tries to normalize all audio levels can create problems, especially during interviews.

24 Hour Inaugural Day Timelapse
I knew early on that I wanted to document the entire inauguration day using timelapse photography. The problem was, locations with quality perspectives of Pennsylvania Ave. were limited. Josh Hatch, a fellow multimedia producer at USA TODAY, milked some of his connections at the Newseum and secured a prime location for the camera pointing east at the U.S. Capitol. We crunched some numbers and decided one frame every 15 seconds would be suitable to capture at least one frame of Obama’s motorcade in the foreground of our shot and also provide ample image to create the timelapse. I used a pocket wizard as the intervalometer, plugged the camera into an AC outlet, mounted the camera on a magic arm and teethered the camera to a laptop inside the Newseum. You know the drill. I wrapped the camera in bubble wrap for insulation and weatherization and taped a hand warmer pack onto the pocket wizard so the battery wouldn’t freeze overnight. God save the hand warmer.

Earlier that week, I wrote a script that would automatically copy, resize and automatically FTP the images in real time back to the USA TODAY servers for virtually live posting on our Web site. Everything went according to plan up until the teethering. Apparently, the 30 feet of USB cable carrying images from the camera outside in 20-degree weather simply didn’t have enough power to reach the computer. So, we ditched the teethering approach and inserted a large memory card.

Props
I worked with some amazing folks on this project and I can’t wait for round two. Rhyne Piggott followed an intimate story about a Tuskegee Airman. Garrett Hubbard documented a million-dollar benefactor who purchased 300 hotel rooms overlooking Pennsylvania Ave. for the less fortunate. Rhyne, Garrett and Steve were amazing to work with. We had above a dozen video journalists who contributed content for the documentary. The full list of credits appears at the end of chapter seven.

Modularity is a highly customizable multimedia theme framework for WordPress. The theme design was developed with users who appreciate visual browsing and prefer a minimal layout, with their photos and multimedia featured front and center. Virtually every aspect of the theme design can be controlled from either the Theme Options page or the Homepage Settings page.

Modularity includes:

• Built in full-screen HD video player
• Optional homepage slideshow
• Optional homepage Mac-style image slider gallery
• Optional homepage Magazine-style post layout
• Optional homepage blog-style layout
• Theme Options page, where you can define background, text, link colors, contact info, site tracking code and more.
• Homepage Settings page where you can choose which apps show up on your homepage layout
• S.E.O. optimized titles and alt tags
• Four widgetized areas
• Click-down navigation for a compact, minimalist masthead.
• Built in multimedia custom field support
• Automatic thumbnail generation. No need to manage thumbnails using custom fields
• Blueprint CSS framework
• Valid, clean code

The theme includes “apps” which you can enable or disable from the Homepage Settings page. These apps can transform the theme into a portfolio site for photographers and multimedia producers, a magazine-style site, or a normal blog-style homepage literally at the click of a button. In the future, we will be releasing “child themes” for Modularity to provide design alternatives and additional applications that will make Modularity even more configurable. You’ll definitely want to subscribe to GraphPaperPress.com to keep up on all the latest developments and enhancements for Modularity.