Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

So, 360 seems to be a big thing that people are getting excited about right now. It's a newer, kind of a technology, and it's kind of interesting. So I've got some cameras here you can see on the screen. This is a variety of consumer 360 cameras, and you can see, there's all kinds there, some of them newer than others. Initially they had them and they would rotate 360 degrees taking photos, and then we've got ones with lenses on both sides, and then we've got them with six lenses and eight lenses, and cameras and they're just really exploding right now, so what is the point of a 360 camera? What is a 360 camera, maybe is a good place to start. So, I have a couple here. This one here was one that really kicked off the revolution, as far as like the first decent quality one that was available for everybody, and this one here is the Ricoh Theta. You might have heard of it. This is the V, so this shoots 4K, so it does video, and it also shoots photographs, so what does it do? Well, notice ...

it has a lens on either side, so you can see one lens there, one there. So what it does is it shoots with both lenses at the same time, and these are fish-eye lenses, so these are 180 degree fish-eye lenses. Both of these lenses will shoot, and then stitch, and it will create a fully immersive 3D photograph. So this is one. It's a very popular one right there. Notice I've got the cases for them, and it's very easy to say, oh, the lens is there. Well I'll put it down on the table, but because you've got a lens on both sides, it's a good idea to keep them inside the bags. I was hanging out with Ben Willmore, and he was telling me off all the time, dude, put your camera back in the bag, and so, it's a very hard habit to get into, but you do want to do that and protect those lenses, even if they don't get scratched, you don't want to get them dirty or smudged when you're trying to take photos. So this is another one here. This is a newer one. This is the Insta360 ONE, so the company that makes it is Insta360 and the model is the One, so this is Neo, you are the one, and this is a new one. This is really cool, so it does the 4K video, and it does photos and all that stuff as well, but this one actually has stabilization built into it, so you can actually walk with it, or you know, ride a skateboard or bicycle, run, whatever, and shoot 360 all the way around while it's stabilized, and if you've ever worn Goggles, anyone ever worn Goggles? So one of the ways you can view is you put the 360 glasses on, the VR glasses, and you can look around, and if you're running and bouncing, it's gonna give people motion sickness like really fast, so it's kind of cool like that, so this shoots those. Of course, there's bigger ones. There's more professional ones, you know, for shooting VR, so really what they're being used for right now is AR-VR, which is Augmented Reality Virtual Reality. The difference between AR and VR is virtual reality is when you're totally immersed. You put the goggles on, you put the sound on, you're no longer in this world. You're now interacting with this virtual world, and you know, it could be a video game, could be demos, you know, in the future, I think we're gonna be seeing a lot of training, different things like that where it's a very, if you've never done it, it's quite a freaky thing, you know, to go in there. Got the HTC Vive, they've got that Google Cardboard. They've got Oculus. There's all kinds of different goggles that you can get. Now when you put these goggles on, you want to look around. Well you can't look around if there's nothing to look at, so that's why you shoot video and you shoot photos with these 360 cameras which will capture everything. Up, down, everywhere you look, you put the goggles on, and everyone can look around. And you're in this world, in the virtual world, you know, you're like, you're gone. It's like, it's so freaky like, a friend of mine, there's a group of us. We rented a place for Christmas out at Palm Springs. Big group of us in this big house, and one of the guys works at Facebook, so he had all the VR goggles and stuff like that, and it was the first time I'd ever used it, and I was like, you know, I know this is fake. I've been doing technology, you know, my whole life since you know, they invented, I don't know, whatever they invented, dice. (laughter) I'm not, you know, a debtor. Anyway, so I've been doing here, so I figure, this is not really gonna have a big effect on me, 'cause I know it's fake. I remember, like, 3D glasses and friends with nVidia, so I like went to nVidia's headquarters a few years ago. I did a campaign with them, and I had all this stuff, like I was looking at, you know, Star Wars in 3D before it came out, and all this stuff is in this room they have with all this stuff, and I'm okay, I'm ready for this, so I put these glasses on, and it's like there's a building, and it's almost like being in the Matrix. You remember when they were like, everybody falls the first time, you know. You guys seen The Matrix. Sorry, that was a spoiler, wasn't it? (laughter) If you haven't seen The Matrix yet, you never are. Okay, so anyway, so, there's a building, and I'm like clinging against the wall, and he's like, walk up to the edge of the building. I'm like, no way, I can't even walk, and I know it's not real, and I couldn't even walk to the edge of the building. It's like that real, let alone, step over. And that's just like early days right now, so you know, this is kind of exciting because I don't necessarily think these little cameras are that revolutionary to me, or what we're doing right now, you know, like what I'm gonna show you today is cool. It's fun, but I don't think it's like gonna change the world but what it is what's it's leading towards is what's exciting to me, so the first thing I told you, and this is my theory, by the way, this is all, you know, this is not endorsed by Creative Live. This is Colin's opinion of what might happen in the future, so you know, VR is like, you know, the virtual world, and then, AR is augmented reality, so augmented reality is when you see the world, but then things are like appear to interact with us, so it'd be like overlays, so like imagine title bars, and screens, and little things overlaying the real world, so you're walking around and you're looking at this, and you're like, what, oh, I wonder if it's hot, and a little thing goes (trilling) you know, around 56 degrees. Eh, I think I prefer cold more, and you put it down, you know, and things like that. You know, you'll see a person (trilling) you know. Imagine business meeting, networking, dating, all these things. I can see that, you're driving, directions at nighttime, you know, maybe you don't even have a window in your car anymore or maybe you've just got this overlay, the VR, so all this kind of stuff is gonna happen. There's games, there's entertainment, there's communications like Facebook right now. You can do this. You can take a 360 picture, you've all seen it, and you pull it out on your phone, and you move your phone around, and it's like you're in this, well I have a phone, and you move it around and you look at it. It's like you have a portal into another world, and you can go all the way around and look at the photo, so you can kind of see that, right. You guys have all done that, right? Yeah, if you don't have a phone, then you scroll, like that, you know, and you do it, or you can see it on your computer, but the other thing you can do too is, you know, you can put the goggles on inside of Facebook, and you can actually look inside the virtual worlds inside of Facebook, and that's actually where I got these. These are, my friend Eric Chang, he works for Facebook. He's in charge of the interactive experience there and these are his 360 cameras, his small ones he's playing with. He's got big, crazy weird ones as well, so it's a thing right now. Everybody's into it. It's fun, it's entertainment, but I think, you know, we've got a lot of really useful purposes for it in the future when it comes to, you know, like practical things like learning. Imagine a surgeon, you know, doing surgery, and you know, I'd be a little worried if my doctor forgot what a heart or a liver looked like, but anyway, so they're in there and they're doing surgery, but imagine an overlay, you know, showing, you know, a magnified view or things like that. There's so many practical things, you know, you're on an airplane and the pilot passes out. Is there a pilot on board, nope. Put the glasses on and at base station, they've got this, okay, this is how you fly the plane. I mean, like, there's so many things we can do. It's really exciting. It's the beginning of a new world. All right, have I talked it up good enough yet? So there's other tools that we can use for 360 like drones. So for example, the drones can shoot a 360 degree panorama, so this is the latest DJI Mavic Air, so this is the little baby, but it's really cool. Folds out, somehow, there we go. I don't have a battery in it right now, so I'm not gonna take off, but you can fold this out, and then this can fly. It's got a camera inside here, and then, there's a pano mode, so it'll go up, and then a camera will tilt up, the drone will shoot around. It'll move around, move around, tilt the camera up, tilt the camera down, and it'll move around until it creates a 360 degree shot, and then it can stitch it together inside the app, so even regular cameras like this are able to do this now, so there's a lot of stuff, like everybody is racing. It's like, you know, VR, AR, it's a thing, 360. These cameras are the way to get there. Okay, so let's talk about the cameras. So now, when you shoot with these cameras, something unique happens that you're not used to, and that's the fact that everything around you is gonna be captured, so it's not just what's in front of you, it's what's behind you. Let me open up a picture here, because you know, we're talking about it here. Let's have a look at it, and I'm gonna show you a little problem that happens sometimes. So here's a shot, and I shot this one just couple of days ago at San Francisco, Union Square. Okay, so this is before we worked on it. I'll show you what we can do inside of PhotoShop, how we can view it and work on it, but this is what a 360 photo looks like, so what that's done is it's captured the entire environment, and that was just using this little one here, and I just put it out there, and I just hit the button, and it took a photograph. Now, notice I got the lobster hand, and that's something that happens on these. Everyone is gonna get the lobster hand, unless you use a selfie stick, so, well, I almost put that down, see? (laughs) So here's the selfie stick so I'm gonna put this here. This is the Insta360. I figured I should put it on that stick since it's the Insta360 selfie stick, so I just turn that and whoop, and I've got that, and now I can put it up high, and I can take photographs where I'm not right in front of the shot every time. Everybody doesn't want to see my face as much as I think they do. Everyone doesn't want to see my face every time they open a photograph, although looking at the top of my head is probably much worse, but anyway. (laughter) So, we can do that. The other thing you can do too that I experimented with a little bit. It was a little weird, but I think it has potential is if you want to push it over a balcony, you know, you could go that way, 'cause remember, it shoots in 360 degrees. Now, this is gonna become invisible. When you use a selfie stick, it's designed that this is the blind spot. Every camera has a blind spot, and that's it right there, so it's designed that way, so this one's kind of fun, so this camera here can do photos, videos, and also has another mode, which I haven't done yet, 'cause I just got this, and you know, stay tuned, follow me on social media, and I'll show you what I'm gonna do with this. Bullet time, so with bullet time, it's like The Matrix. You go in here, you attach a piece of fishing line, and so this can do 120 frames per second, and you spin it around yourself, and it'll create this a la Matrix kind of, you know, thing where you can like do that, so look for that. I'm gonna be doing a review on YouTube pretty soon, and I'm gonna do a bullet time. I wish I had it with me now, but I just got the camera, haven't had time to do it yet, so I will show that, so once again, keep these in the cases. Keep these cameras nice and safe. Okay, some things to bear in mind when you're working with these cameras. One, as you can see, it gets everything. So like yesterday, I was at the Space Needle, and I'm gonna use the pictures today. Some people started making out on the chair, and I was, and you know, and down right, you know, I can't, I couldn't, I was like, I cannot take a picture now because that, you've gotta be aware of that, you know, I mean, you know, people kissing is fine, but you know, it's embarrassing for some people, so anyway, so I didn't want to do that, so you've always gotta watch what's going on. Someone's doing a drug deal over there, don't take the picture until they're done. (laughing) Literally, this is the ultimate spy camera. You just go snap and it's got everything, right, everything is all captured in one shot, as long as you can see it from the lens, of course, so be aware of that, you know, in all seriousness, I don't think people, this is not very discrete. I'm joking about the sky spy part, but anyway, so think about it like, as a photographer, you're used to seeing your field of view which is pretty good, you know. The human eye can go to about, you know, my peripheral vision goes to about there. How about you guys? Probably the same, right. We can see peripheral, but we can really see about here, and then, we can really focus in around about here, so you know, when we take a photograph, we're always kind of looking around. We're thinking about the composition. Okay, what's gonna be nice framing for this photo, right? Framing, isn't that the first thing we learn about photography? Framing's gone. There's no framing. Doesn't exist, so you know, it's like, oh wow, limitations, they're gone. We actually work really well with limitations, by the way. The less limitations we have. So one of the things I think that the camera of the future is, and I said this years ago, and I haven't changed my mind. The camera of the future is gonna be a ball. You're just gonna throw it up in the air, and it's gonna capture photographs. It's gonna be 360 degrees. It's gonna capture everything. It's gonna have a unlimited dynamic range, so it's gonna capture all the shadows or highlight, and it's gonna have, you know, the depth of field adjustment, you know, like Lytro cameras. So literally, you know, this walking around with cameras, and a little left, that's gonna be gone. We're gonna do that. We're just gonna boom, take the picture, and then we're gonna go into our software and we're gonna compose a photo. Like it or not, that's what I believe is gonna happen one day, and this is getting closer. It's getting much closer, so right now, we have this that can shoot it all the way around, so number one, be aware of what's behind you, as well as what's in front of you, 'cause what's behind you is just important. So you want to find an area that looks good. Sometimes, you know, there's a pole. Maybe there's a garbage can, so you want to move so that pole's hiding the garbage can, or whatever, and you just kind of look around until you find a spot that's really interesting and there's stuff going on all the way around you. That's a good place to start. The other thing you want to do is make sure this is level. If you've got it tilted a little bit like this, it's gonna be hard. You want to have it perfectly level 'cause when you start to pan around, if it's tilted, it's gonna, it's gonna look weird, and it's gonna be harder to pan, so be aware of that. The other thing is too, you don't want things too close to the camera, so when you're taking photographs on here, if your face is really close, it's gonna be distorted and weird. Also, it's blocking a lot of information. You know, you have a wall behind you, a pole, things like that. If you can get further away and put a little bit of distance, you know, a few feet between you and the obstacles, you're gonna get a better shot. Here's the other thing too. This is a little foot here. This is DJI's little tripod for the, well, what's it for, for their Ronin, the little one. (audience speaking indistinctly) The Osmo, thank you, so it's the Osmo tripod, so I figured it works really well on there, so I can put it on and it will just hold it there. So, it's kind of nice to do that, and then, just put it there if you're gonna take a shot, or you're gonna do a time lapse. You definitely don't want to move it. Sometimes with video, it's best just to leave it still, so something like that is nice. It's really portable, as you saw. You know, I can just fold this up, real small. Carry it in your bag, pull it out, and you're ready to go. So funny thing is it used to be a while ago, people used to see these, and still, they're like, what is that? I was in San Francisco. It was really funny, you know, so I'm there, and all these kids come over and they're like, dude, are you streaming live on YouTube? (laughter) What is this? A 360 camera. He's live on YouTube, and I want to get in the shot, so they knew exactly what it was. So anyway, so that's kind of the gear there. Oh, another thing, think about the height, so when you're composing it, the only real compositional control you have really is height, and I talk about that a lot in my drone stuff, and it's the same kind of concept, so you want to just kind of experiment until you see a nice height that's showing just the detail and the information and stuff that you want to show in the photos.