Voices: Travel photos in 360 offer new lens on life

SPRINGDALE, Utah – The majestic red rock landscape here is awe-inspiring, and I want to capture it with my camera. But the area is so vast, I can only see a part of it with my lens.

For that reason, I’ve switched to travel photos the 360-degree way, using one of the new Virtual Reality cameras with two lenses and a spherical look at this amazing world of ours.

For me, photography with standard cameras will never be the same.

Think about it. You arrive at the scene and look out at this massive, wide landscape. If you’re shooting on a smartphone, you don’t have a wide angle lens to play with, and you’re lucky if you can pick up 20%-30% of it. Sure, you can add a wide-angle attachment lens to the smartphone, but you’re still missing too much.

When I shoot landscapes, I want really, really wide.

So consider the 360-degree, spherical view camera. You get all sides of the shot: the left and right, the top and bottom, the front and back.

Yes, it’s a little distorted and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, but that’s what makes it so much fun.

The big buzzword this year in media circles has been #360, with Facebook and YouTube both touting 360 videos that can be viewed in a new way. It makes you the director, putting you in control of the show as you tilt the phone left or right to shift the position of the camera. (This week, YouTube announced that you can now livestream 360 video directly on YouTube.)

Beyond smartphones, new VR headsets from Facebook’s Oculus, HTC’s Vive, Samsung’s Gear VR and the coming Microsoft Hololens take you to new worlds by immersing you into gaming. Don the Gear VR at Six Flags amusement parks this summer and ride a roller coaster by watching a flight game as you go up and down hills.

But VR is more than video and gaming. It’s photography, too.

My travel photos, in 360, also let you see way more, and selfishly, they look unlike anyone else’s  – or at least until 360 cameras become standard fare.

I’ve been shooting a lot on the $349 Ricoh Theta S camera, a convenient pocket camera with two lenses, one for the front and one for the back. There are a handful of others out as well, including the $350 360Fly camera that Best Buy has been promoting, and a Kodak model. GoPro has a 15-camera rig called the Jump that is expected to be released later this year, along with new models from Samsung, Nikon and others.

You have to approach your shot very differently when composing in 360. With one lens staring back at you in the face, if you’re not careful, you’ll be in every shot.

For 360 landscapes, selfies are not what I’m looking for.

So you need to shoot differently and bring an extra piece of gear with you. A tripod is your best bet, whether a tiny tabletop one that can actually fit in your pocket or one of those despised selfie sticks that are persona non grata at museums all over the world.

Remember that these lenses are so wide, they see practically everything. Even holding the selfie stick high above my head, the camera will pick up the stick.

So I prefer the tripod approach, because it allows you to place the camera low, if needed, or on a ledge, and connect the snapping of the frame with the smartphone app.

This way, you compose your shot on the phone, and step out of the picture. Then, once you move away, you snap the shot.

From the app, you can share the image on Facebook and Twitter, and this part is fantastic: Even though your shot is ultra-ultra wide, you don’t have to crop it to fit the social media window.

What you don’t want to do is organize the traditional group vacation photo the 360 way. Your gang will look distorted, like you were shot by a fun house mirror.

I’m sticking with 360 for landscapes. It’s just too much fun getting the front and back of what I see in one image.

Now if that isn’t a virtual reality, what is?

Jefferson Graham is a USA TODAY tech columnist, photographer and the host of the #TalkingTech video and audio show. Follow him on Twitter @jeffersongraham