I began shooting interactive 360° panoramas immediately after the technology was invented by Apple Computer. My first panoramas, beginning in August 1996, were shot on 35 mm negative film using an improvised camera mount, stitched together using a command line program, and presented in QuickTime VR format. They were published as part of The GeoImages Project website, University of California Berkeley, and were among the first VR panoramas on the web.
My privately published Virtual Guidebooks website appeared on-line January 1, 2000, coinciding with my shift from film to digital cameras. It grew steadily to 8000 panoramas. The panorama presentation technology had to be converted from QTVR to Flash, and eventually converted again to html 5. The site contained commercial links to Amazon and other vendors.
In September 2011 I undertook a thorough revision of the site, starting with the name. The original Virtual Guidebooks concept made sense early on, when I planned to develop detailed travel guides illustrated with VR panoramas. But this would have required either a staff of researchers and writers, or a partnership with an existing travel guide publisher. Neither of those worked out, and I eventually removed advertising links entirely.
The new name, Don Bain's 360° Panoramas, better describes the website's contents and purpose. I continued to shoot and produce panoramas, publishing them as a non-profit venture. I like to say it is "my contribution to Western Civilization".
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In March 2004 I was one of the founders of The World Wide Panorama, a quarterly event promoting 360° panoramic photography that is still active. Over a thousand people have participated in this project over the last twenty years.
In June 2007 I helped produce TheInternational VR Photography Conference, held on the University of California Berkeley campus, where I was employed as Director of the Geography Computing Facility.
For several years I was vice-president of the International VR Photography Association. In April 2010 I organized the conference Tucson 2010, in Arizona, on behalf of the IVRPA. In June 2011 I curated two gallery exhibitions for the IVRPA's Palmela 2011 conference in Portugal.
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The once and future website you see here covers 33 states, provinces, and territories. When rebuilding concludes it will contain about 100 Regions, at least 2900 Localities, and more than 15,000 360° panoramas. It is entirely my own work, and represents more than a quarter century of effort.
I continued to create new 360 panoramas regularly until 2020. I took a year off to concentrate on 360° panoramic road-trip videos shot from the roof of my camper, which was a technological dead end. Then I directed my energy to writing three novels, two of which have been self-published on Amazon.
My self-assigned task in 360° photography has always been to comprehensively document western North America, exploring widely and photographing places I find interesting. I do not shoot private spaces, or commercial venues such as amusement parks. I do not do commercial work.
I have traveled from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of Baja California, all over the western half of the US and Canada, and across the southern tier of states east to Florida, plus Hawaii. The geographic extremes encompassed by this website are Deadhorse in Alaska to the northwest, Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada to the northeast, Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, Mexico, to the southwest, South Point on the Big Island of Hawai'i even further south, and Key West in Florida to the southeast. Plus a few places in French Polynesia and one in Scotland.
Despite the broad spread of my photographic documentation, more than half of the panoramas were taken in my home state of California. With a thousand miles of coastline, ten national parks, the tallest trees, the biggest trees, the oldest trees, the highest point (excepting Alaska), the lowest point, and several large cities, California has provided ample subject matter. Plus, I live right in the middle of the state, the San Francisco Bay Area.
I prefer national parks and natural landscapes to cities, but I have covered some urban places quite well, notably San Francisco (where I was born) and New Orleans (where I lived for two years). Several series of photographs follow a historical theme such as the Oregon Trail, the Klondike Gold Rush, and the historic Spanish missions in the southwest and Mexico.
I have made a special effort to visit all the western national parks, as well as BC provincial parks and California state parks. A few special topics have engaged my interest – lighthouses, trains, bridges, Sequoia groves, ghost towns, historic sites, hot springs, Polynesian religious sites, and more.
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My preferred mode of travel is to drive and camp. My traveling equipage has evolved from an SUV and a tent, to a simple van with a plywood bed platform, to a pop-up camper on a four-wheel drive pickup truck, and finally to a comfortable camping van.
I prefer simple campgrounds at national and state parks to RV parks. I frequently "boondock", camp without a campground, usually in remote forest or desert areas of the west. In Hawaii I have most often stayed in condos or hotels, but have also tent-camped out of a tiny rental car. In Baja California I have enjoyed camping on beaches.
I have never totaled up all of my road-trip distances, but it may well be over a quarter million miles. My longest trips have been to Alaska and the Northwest Territories of Canada, to the southern tip of Baja California, and across the continent to Florida, always originating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Unpaved roads have been some of my most memorable, notably the Dalton and Dempster Highways in the far north.
My longest continuous solo drive was from Kamloops, BC, to Berkeley, California, just over 1000 miles, done in about 18 hours including brief rest stops, and going straight back to work the next morning.
Most of my serious photography trips have been done solo, but my wife Nora has accompanied me on some, sometimes flying to meet me mid-trip, or to avoid a long drive home. My friends Kat and Landis Bennett have been frequent companions on the road — in 1999 we traveled together the length of Baja California on the Vernal Equinox, and to the Arctic Circle in Canada on the Summer Solstice.
Ferryboats have frequently been a part of my travels in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. I made one trip to Alaska on a cruise ship with ten members of my family. Only one short side-trip has been done by air, from Juneau to Glacier Bay National Park.
A few panoramas were made on overnight backpack trips – the high Sierra and Lost Coast in California, and Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies. I regret that my 360 photography did not overlap more with my backpacking and mountaineering years, especially my hikes in the High Sierra.
My only serious trouble on these trips was when my van broke down near the Arctic Circle in Alaska and had to be towed to Fairbanks. No problems with hostile people or wildlife, though I did have a close-up encounter with a grizzly bear – which I photographed from the safety of my van. No medical emergencies either, though I did suddenly develop appendicitis a mere three weeks after camping alone on a remote beach in Baja, where i could easily have died before getting medical attention.
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During the time I was taking 360 panoramas I made other trips, to England, Scotland, and Portugal, but did not shoot panoramas for my site. A trip to French Polynesia on university business resulted in a handful of panos. But those early days of VR photography were so demanding, and expensive, that I did not shoot on the rest of that epic South Pacific trip – Rarotonga, Atiu, Aitutaki, Fiji, and American Samoa. I would love to reprise that trip with modern 360-photography equipment.
Although I retiried from active panorama photography in 2017, I made an impulsive trip to Hawaii in 2024 specifically to update and complete my coverage of the island of Oahu. By then advancements in technology had reduced the time to shoot and produce panoramas from hours to minutes.
I regret that I never managed to get back to Dominica, a spectacular island in the West Indies where I did graduate research for almost a year. Other bucket list destinations missed are Haida Gwai (the Queen Charlotte Islands) in British Columbia, the island of Moloka'i in Hawaii, and the colonial town of Álamos in Sonora, Mexico.
I do have some unfinished business, panoramas not taken in areas I have visited. Trips to fill in those gaps are still a possibility — parts of Southern California, and some areas in Florida. There is a remote possibility of a major trip to the Eastern Caribbean — Antigua, Dominica, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Grenada, and Barbados, or a loop through the South Pacific.