 University is already familiar with the photographs of the Thomas ship. The very, very large image that hangs in our library entrance was taken by Tom in 2009. It's a particularly special image for us because it was the three millionth edition to art collection. Now there are only about 75 libraries in Northern America that have that large a collection and it was Tom's image that brought us into that rarefied year. But Alden isn't the only library that Thomas photographs. He's traveled across the United States with his Ultorama 360 panoramic camera documenting our country's libraries. His latest book, which is simply titled The Library Book, offers a unique perspective into a uniquely American institution, which is the London Library. In the afterword of the library book, Tom wrote that a library is invariably a statement a realization of the prevailing or forward-looking civic ideals by the architect, the philanthropist, and the community. And I couldn't agree more. Tom published his first book, The Photography, panoramic Cincinnati in 2003 and since then he's published five other books of panoramic photography. He's the founder of Photofocus, a lens-based art plan. He's a 1970 alum from Ohio University and currently works in Cincinnati. Interviewing Tom is Dr. Mary McIntorpe, a special collection librarian from here in Alden Library. She's been at Ohio University since 2003. She received her PhD in history from the City University of New York and curates Alden Library's rare book collection and documentary photo art. Please join me in welcoming Tom Shield. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Welcome and welcome, Tom. Thank you. We're very happy to have you here and very pleased to have your photographs on exhibit and to welcome your beautiful library book, which... There it is. You can see right here, fresh off the press. There's also a copy in the exhibit, so if you haven't seen it yet, there's one that you can actually leaf through the pages and I highly, highly recommend that you do so. So let's start with a little bit of background. Scott just mentioned that you're an alum of Ohio University. Can you tell us what you studied here and how the university might have impacted you and your career path? Well, I came to Ohio University in 1965 and started out studying photography in the School of Fine Arts. But I ended up switching my studies and I ended up getting a bachelor's degree in business administration in 1970. But I never gave up photography. Always still taking pictures whenever I had a spare moment and I've been doing that all along. And it's been 50 years since I've been here, so that goes back a few years. So you've been taking photographs ever since. I guess maybe starting question would be what brought you to the university to study photography in the first place and why did you end up switching to business? Well, I think back then there were very few colleges that offered photography as a major. I think they were just a handful, maybe three or four or five, which is a lot different from today. But I came here, my whole family went to Ohio State, so I was kind of the black sheep of the family going to OU instead of Ohio State. And I studied photography and studied with Clarence White, who is the son of the great Clarence White senior. And I enjoyed it, but I think I was a little frustrated and I just wasn't making the photos. I thought I should have been making, so I switched to the business world and my family's in business, so I ended up going back to Cincinnati after graduation and working in the insurance business. But taking photographs the whole time? Taking photos the whole time and weekends and vacation and whenever I had a chance. Do you remember when you got your first camera? Had you been photographing for a long time? Yeah, pretty long time. In grade school I remember having little Kodak brownie cameras and I remember taking it to school one day and taking pictures of my classmates. Which back then wasn't really done, it was kind of unusual. And today kids have cell phones with cameras built in and they take pictures everywhere all the time. True. And then in high school I spent a lot of time taking pictures of school activities for the yearbook and the newspaper. That was great fun. And then I had a buddy of mine who went to school here at the same time, Paul Shrands, who taught photography for many years at Governor State University and he's retired now, living in New Mexico. And Paul and I would go out and we'd spend, get together for a weekend and go out and take photos. For many years I kind of stuck to large format photography. I had a 4x5 and an 8x10 view camera and back then black and white was the big thing. And that's what I did for many, many years. And I think about 25 or so years ago I felt I needed to change direction a little bit. And I don't know how I stumbled upon it, but somehow I discovered panoramic photography and a little investigating in it and decided to buy a camera and try it out. And I liked it. And I've decided then to switch from black and white to color because the technology had improved greatly over that period of time. So you're already interested in large format when you came across panoramic. What is it about that format that interested you then and has continued to draw you to it through their present day? Yeah, well I think when you work in a large format camera with a 4x5 or an 8x10 camera you have to be in the habit of putting the camera on a tripod and setting up the camera and focusing the lens and it's kind of a time consuming process. So it kind of forces you to slow down and take a look at what you're doing. And back then sheet film was relatively expensive unlike digital which you can take a thousand pictures and then delete them all if you don't like them. Back then you had to pay for film and take the time to process it. So it was kind of an easy transition to the panoramic camera because you still have to set it up on a tripod. And I remember going to Las Vegas I did a book on panoramic photos of Las Vegas about nine or ten years ago. And you know you set the camera up and then you kind of have to wait for the sun to set a little bit where you have a good blend of illumination from the light bulbs on the strip in Las Vegas but still have a little bit of daylight left to lighten up the sky. So as you sit there waiting hundreds of tourists will walk by pick out the camera and take a quick picture and move on. And in the time it takes me to shoot a panoramic photo somebody's already taken 50 photographs in the area so you have to kind of stop and slow down and contemplate things. And that's part of what appeals to you about the process. You take a picture at sunset you never know when the right moment is so you end up taking a few pictures a few minutes before sunset you wait and you take another one and then another one a couple minutes after sunset and another one just before it gets completely dark. So you might be at a location for a half hour or so shooting two or three or four rolls of film. So you have to be patient. To be patient. Has your process changed with the switch to digital or not so much with panoramic? Not so much with panoramic. I've used a few digital panoramic cameras and I've never really been satisfied with them. I think one of the problems is that the technology, the design of the cameras requires a lot of attention and engineering and there really aren't a big enough demand for panoramic cameras to justify companies constantly updating the technology. So the technology on some of those cameras was already maybe five or ten years dated. So I just stuck with film. Once the film's developed I'll have the negative digitized and then from the digital file, then it goes into Photoshop and I treat it like a regular digital picture. After the fact. There's also a difference though between panoramic photography and the 360 perspective or the camera that you use, right? Can you talk a little bit about that? One of the cameras is over there. It's the white box camera there. It's called the Hulterama and it actually sits on a tripod and when you turn on the switch, that starts the motor and the camera swings around in a circle and makes an image that actually could exceed 360 degrees. You'll notice on some of the photographs if you look to the extreme left and right of the picture you'll see the same image. It's an image that actually overlaps itself so it's maybe a 390 degree or so image. But it's not new technology. It's very old. Back over a hundred years ago there was a company called the Circuit Camera Company and they made panoramic cameras and my camera uses just regular Kodak roll film that's two and a quarter inches high by three feet long or so. Back then they didn't have enlargers and they didn't have darkroom enlargers so in order to make a photograph you had to make a print the same size as the negatives so they had very large negatives. The film was ten inches high maybe by five or ten feet long and when you looked at the roll it looked kind of like a player piano roll that you put in a player piano. So how do you develop and print film that's negatives that are that size? You just have kind of a big tub of just regular black and white developer and you submerge it in the developer and then kind of roll it back and forth for eight or nine or ten minutes whatever you needed to develop it and then stop bath and fix it and wash it and just hang it up on a clothesline and then you had to make a print so I had a contact printer that was about four feet wide by a foot long foot deep and you lay the negative out and then you put photographic paper on top of the negative and then tighten the contact between of them and then expose it and develop the paper just pretty much the same as the roll of film but with the Hulterama it's a little more convenient because you're not dealing with ten inch film you're dealing with film that's two and a quarter inches wide so it's a little easier to manage. Still sounds unwieldy. So you mentioned there a little bit about the history of panoramic photography and we've included in the exhibit some books from the Rare Book and Fine Arts Collections about document the history of panoramic photography and I was curious what about the history or how much did you research the history when you were getting into panoramic photography and what kind of impact has it had on you? Well, I just pretty much tried to dig up a few books on panoramic photography and I remember coming across EO Goldbeck which there's a book here of his photographs he was a photographer in Texas who used a circuit camera and he was alive back then I remember I talked to him on the phone once for a little bit and I wanted to send a video crew down to Texas to interview him but he said he was suffering from cancer and couldn't participate and then I think about six months later or so he was dead but he was a real workaholic and he traveled around and made a lot of panoramic photos and then conventional photos for the military I'm interested and then he was also a member of a group called the International Association of Panoramic Photographers and they had a meeting once a year that would be held in Las Vegas or Orlando, Florida, California and I went to a few of those and got to meet other photographers and meet vendors who had different types of cameras for sale You also told a fascinating story when we were speaking really briefly before this began about a very particular camera that somebody built I think, would you mind talking about that again? Well, this is about a talk that somebody gave in fact it was one of those meetings of the panoramic photographers a fellow did some research and found some very kind of unusual, unique maybe offbeat ways of people made photographs a long time ago on one fellow made a camera out of a railroad car so he would make a photograph he put a lens on one side of the camera car or one side of the railroad car and put either photographic paper or film on the opposite side so this box car essentially became a camera and it was stationary he moved it into position or whatever he wanted to photograph and opened the lens and exposed it and developed the paper and he had a photograph that was maybe 10 or 15 feet high by 30 feet wide and talked about another fellow that had a kite and he attached a camera and this was over 100 years ago before they had airplanes so he had kind of a large kite because they had to hold this camera that was probably 5 or 10 pounds and attached the camera to the kite and flew it up in the air and when the kite and the camera looked like it was lined up the way he wanted to make a photograph he pulled a string that released the shutter on the camera and from that photo they made someone would make engravings of aerial scenes of towns and maybe you've seen them in museums or antique stores of an aerial view of a town that was made in the 1800s and you'd say well how did they get that up there because there weren't any airplanes back then but that's how they did it It's fascinating Okay well let's switch to talking a little bit about your current project the library book there's a couple of photos of your photographs of Alden and there's some of these on this floor and also on the second floor Why libraries? Well about 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago I had always taken photos of architecture when I did black and white and then when I switched to panoramic color I still continued that and a good friend of mine who's an architect who was very knowledgeable about a lot of the architectural landmarks around the country he said well here's a list of about 15 or 20 places that you ought to go to and take photos by these well-known architects and I did that for a little bit I travel out to California and New York take some photos and then after a while I noticed I had a lot of, not a lot, a few photos of libraries movie theaters Frank Lloyd Wright sites scenes from San Francisco and scenes from a place called Columbus, Indiana that has a lot of unique mid-century modern architecture so I thought it would be good to have separate projects because if I was going to California I might not go back to California for several years so while I was there I'd be sure to look up a few libraries look up a few movie theaters and I might only have two or three photos of libraries on one trip but I'd have two or three photos from all the other projects and those became book projects that essentially took 10 to 15 years by the time we got around to all the different locations in the country but I just noticed that most of my research just consisted of looking at pictures on the internet and whenever I was going to San Francisco say I would dig up some information on the libraries and generally speaking the well-designed really good-looking libraries would have a lot of photos of them so it was kind of easy to pick out the libraries I wanted to go to because I was taking a picture inside I had to have permission from somebody from the administration or from the librarian so I'd always have to call a couple weeks ahead because sometimes it took a while to track down the right person to talk to so one striking thing about the library photographs I don't know how well you can see it on the screen here but definitely see it when you're looking at the exhibit or the book which is some of the more traditional historic libraries tend to be full of rows upon rows of bookshelves filled with books and then some of the newer constructions or remodels tend to be much more open space seating areas and sometimes like this library virtually no books to be seen and I just wonder if are those distinctions that you are trying to document or you choose the library based on the architecture or something else do you think there's something important about conveying sort of this evolution of the library well I really kind of based it on the architecture I was looking for a unique architecture that was very well designed and had a real impact and I found that the libraries that were like that say the Boston Athenaeum they paid particular attention to make the place look in really good shape all the time and of course you can see the books and there were some a lot of libraries that would have an atrium or a central area where you couldn't didn't have a lot of books to look at so I you know they didn't look as much like libraries because there weren't any books around but just about all the libraries had a collection of books somewhere there was one library out in Berkeley, California that called itself an all-digital library and there weren't any books in there but there were desks and chairs and people studying and they had their laptops open and they were looking things up on the computer so I guess but I think there's still a big need and a big demand for librarians because I think a Google and a computer is good for answering simple questions you know what's the population of search like Nevada but if you ask it a complex question it has a little trouble and a librarian can help you navigate the library and find the answers that you need for your particular project well we like to hear that use that in our promotional materials but a related question stemming from that and also from what you said about people studying a lot of your interiors appear to be devoid of people and I wonder if that's by design because you really want the focus to be on the architecture or if it's something that's inevitable because it takes you so long to get the shot that you need did you photograph these places when they were closed and also from the librarian's perspective I think for us having a full library is really a point of pride and something we feel is very important so do you think there's any not sure not risk exactly but what the impact of showing empty libraries well some of the libraries were concerned about having their patrons in the photograph and for privacy reasons they said well you can come take photos but we'd like you to show up an hour before it's open so I would go in and take photos as fast as I could and then about an hour later people would start to drift in so I was done taking photos others they weren't concerned about that and sometimes there are people in the photographs but they're just not a lot whenever I get there do you have a favorite interior and exterior I guess these are both interiors but you also take exteriors do you have a favorite? I like mostly the interior photos I think that's where the panoramic camera works best because it can work in kind of tight quarters of course the Library of Congress in Washington DC is probably one of the most spectacular libraries around and then of course the Boston Athenaeum is very nice in its own way it's not quite as big but it's a little more intimate but it's very nice there's a little library in a small town outside of Philadelphia the Given Library that's really pretty unique and what's nice about it is it's one that's not a high profile library it's not like the Library of Congress that everybody's seen a photo of but it's a small town library but it's really immaculate and it's design and upkeep and it's in the book I don't think it's in the exhibit but that's one to look up because it's pretty interesting the Salt Lake City Library is pretty spectacular if you've ever been there or if you've ever seen that the Seattle Public Library is very modern and very contemporary and has a lot of odd angles and a lot of metal construction so it's pretty unique in its own way do you strive to get a balance between historic and modern and also between these sort of very well known spaces and small town or school libraries that most people would not have seen otherwise I don't really start out trying to have a balance I just try to get as many libraries as I can on any one particular visit so it's kind of worked out that I've got a wide range one of the earliest or the earliest library is Jefferson's Monticello which was in his house and I think it was probably a reconstruction of the library because the house at one time was very rundown and very poor shape but they fixed it up and restored it and it's open to the public and I think at one time he sold his books to the United States government to start the Library of Congress where they burned and then there's a very contemporary library at the University of Chicago that was just built maybe six or seven years ago and that's kind of needed has a big glass and metal dome so it's interesting I don't think it's in the exhibit but it's in the book there's a copy of the book I just brought a shipment with me today when we arrived Thank you for that Did you do the Yale Library? Yes, I did a few photos of the Sterling Library and they have a I think it's the Haas family library it's kind of a mid-century modern and the Beinecke Rare Book that's in the book so look that up that was designed by SOM Architects that's where the light comes right through the walls Yeah, it's it's the walls are actually marble but the marble is thin it's thin enough that sunlight comes through but the marbles gives kind of a yellow glow to the light coming through so it really kind of protects the books it's like putting a big filter on a window so the daylight doesn't hurt the books and I think since then they've done a refurbishment of that museum but when I took the picture I think it looked fabulous when I took it about ten years ago Beautiful space Being from the Bay Area I couldn't resist this photo but you'd mentioned preferring interiors of libraries at least to the exteriors you also have a lot of landscapes so how do you seems like there's you enjoy taking photographs of the outside as much as the inside is that architectural also or Well, I'm working on a project in San Francisco I'm going to do a book of San Francisco panoramic photos of mostly architecture but when you go to San Francisco everybody expects that you have a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge so there it is and it was actually made in the water in the bay and you can see both sides of the bridge and I hired a little fishing boat to take me out and set the camera up and I had to deal with the boat rocking back and forth because it takes a few seconds for the camera to swing around in a circle so I timed it right while it was temporarily level and made that photo right around sunset I also had a question about your we just talked about spaces being devoid of people but then you have some of these photographs which are all about the people and I just wondered how that impacts your process if there's so many different people in well this is the speech that John Glenn gave and this is a photo that I used for a project on the bicentennial of Ohio which was in 2003 so starting about 1998 I traveled around the state several times and made photos and I knew he was going to give a speech up at the state house so I arranged to allow myself to take a photo and of course you can see the vantage point is a little higher all these people on kind of the eye level ground level are a little bit lower than me so I have a camera that actually lifts up and it will go up 10 or 20 feet to get an elevated view and this is a photo made outside in daylight so the camera was set for a pretty high speed so the camera only took about 2 seconds to go around in a circle and that was the equivalent of maybe a 30th or a 60th of a second which was enough to slow people down and get a sharp image of them if they're moving and the same for the October celebration in Cincinnati you can see the dancers there who were moving but the camera was moving fast enough to slow them down so are you up on a ladder that high or remote? I'm on the ground and the camera and the tripod are right there but I have a center post on my tripod and I lift the camera up and tighten it and lift another section up so the camera here was maybe 15 feet in the air and then kind of the fun things that I learned about later this photo appeared in a book for the Cincinnati I did a book on Cincinnati and also this was in the Ohio book and one of the fellas in our office came in and said I don't know if you know it or not but that's my dad right there so I heard stories about people who said I got your book but I found a picture of my dad one fellow found a picture of his daughter who was sled riding at the park so you don't find these things out until later so since you mentioned that one thing we'd like to talk about at Authors at Alden since we're in the library is research process how would you pre-research your sites or post-research if something really struck you once you had spent some time there how does that work? Well when I started doing the panoramic photos and decided to do the book projects I concentrated locally and I did a book on Cincinnati and of course these are locations I'd been hundreds of times since I was a kid so I was pretty familiar with them but I'd have to kind of figure out where the action is going to be at what time of the day and I had to make sure that the sun was behind me so I could have the sun shine on the central part of the photograph so you have to kind of be aware if something is going to happen early in the morning or late in the afternoon that's going to determine where the camera is going to be positioned but then when I go out of town to take a photo in California I know I might not be back there for a year or two or three so I kind of have to cover myself I take probably more photos otherwise hoping that if one of the pictures was goofed up there was another one that would work out I want to leave time for audience questions but my last question you mentioned your next project is San Francisco I wonder if you have sort of a dream project that you are working on or would love to work on someday well I'm kind of working on those right now I've made most of my photographs for all these projects the time to put the books together I'm actually having two more books come out this year I did a book of Frank Lloyd Wright sites about nine or ten years ago traveling around the country there are about five hundred Frank Lloyd Wright sites still in existence in America and we photographed over a hundred of them but when I photographed the sites in Ohio I made sure to make extra photographs to do another book which is at the printer right now and we're doing that in conjunction with the Ohio history connection and the West God House and the West God House is a public Frank Lloyd Wright site that's open to the public up in Springfield, Ohio and they're going to have a big party on June 10th to celebrate Frank Lloyd Wright's 150th birthday so we're kind of anxious to get the book printed back in time for the big celebration I'm doing another book of Cincinnati well since this photo was made in Cincinnati this is the Fountain Square area which is the center of town they've completely remodeled this and they've eliminated a lot of these structures in here so this is kind of outdated photos so over the last few years I've made a lot of new photos of Cincinnati and they have a new riverfront park and a new skyline with new buildings so that's a book that's going to come out sometime a little bit before Christmas and it's going to be a fundraiser for the local animal shelter SPCA Cincinnati probably in about a year and a half or so we'll have the San Francisco project wrapped up and that'll be a book and exhibition and also I've been working on movie theaters so I photographed probably close to 200 movie theaters around the country and some of them are the old grand theaters that are pretty decorative and stylish there are a few new ones it's hard to find a new theater that looks nice most of them are kind of big and boxy and kind of ugly looking but there are a few good looking ones around so we photographed those and that'll be hopefully an exhibition at the museum and moving image up in Queens, New York so we have several projects to look forward to right, yeah so thank you I'd love to take some questions yeah please come up and use the mic I'm Mark Maranelli I don't know if you have business law for me or not college of business when you were here yeah I had 1968 maybe yeah well I was here teaching yeah okay one does your photography lend itself to art museums and the collections at an art museum and second of all when you talked about movie theaters I thought of our Stuart Opera House in Nelsonville and that would be an interesting project old opera, I don't know how many are still there but it's not the same as a movie theater but it's certainly of an interest yeah well that could be a good question I could have planted I've made several photographs of opera houses around Ohio for kind of a semi-finished project and the Stuart Opera House is in that selection and I think back in the old days when they'd have a community meeting place and they built a theater I think they called it an opera house because it sounded a little classier than just saying the downtown theater but the Stuart Opera House is working on also a lot of art museums and photographed the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the San Francisco the Young Museum and the Legion of Honor so those are all in future projects that don't have a timeline yet and they're building a lot of new museums and a lot of additions to existing museums so there's a lot left to photograph thank you talk a little bit about the placement of the camera but this seems to be this kind of photography would be a particular challenge I would think about how you determine where to place a camera from what perspective that you get could you sort of that's a good question when you're inside a room but generally you try to place the camera in the middle of the room you want to have a location that has something to look at in all four directions and generally speaking a photographer using a conventional camera will back himself into the corner to get as wide of view as he can but you can't do that with a panoramic camera in the middle of the room and also it helps a little to elevate the camera because if you take a photo from the ground level half of the picture will be the floor and the light stand and the rug and stuff that really kind of clutters up the photograph and when you're outside you have park cars you have stop signs and mailboxes and sewer lids and when you get the camera 10 or 20 feet you get above all that and those things might be in the picture but they'll be very small and you won't have anything blocking the view from that height Any other questions? You referenced a panoramic photographer group and I was curious as to how many photographers do do this kind of work and then secondly I was reminded as students you're using their iPhone to take that panoramic photo which certainly lends itself to think that this will continue on with younger people having an interest in this kind of photography just from the experience of using their iPhones Right, yeah well this was a group that I went to several meetings probably 25 years ago and it's the International Association of Panoramic Photographers and there were only about a thousand members compared that to the millions of cameras that are manufactured over a given period of time so you can see it's a pretty small selection of photographers so not a lot of photographers do it there's a book that kind of reviews the various panoramic cameras that have been around and they're pretty obscure you just never see those cameras very often it's kind of specialized the camera I used the Hulterama when I bought it it was serial number 124 so there have only been 124 made up till then and I bought one maybe three or four years later and it was serial number like 129 so they didn't make a lot of them it was made in a machine shop one at a time at the factory the guy that started at Charles Hulter was an engineer and he also made a lot of high speed cameras that were used by NASA they would bolt these cameras onto the structures next to rockets down at Cape Canaveral and when the rocket went up they take all these photographs and then if the rocket blew up they can go back and look at the photos and try to figure out what happened and sometimes some of the cameras would get blown up too camera cost maybe that accounts for so few people doing that yeah the camera was about $5,000 and it had a lot of machine parts in it and a motor conventional Mamiya lens so just a regular lens you put on a conventional camera and the high speed cameras I don't know what those were in I'm sure they were more expensive I think they had a big roll of film and they turned it spun very fast and made several photographs in one second I have no time pretty well but I wanted you to if you could mention photography dating back to your time here at Ohio University in the study of the history of photography and that how that led itself to your involvement in wanting to help form educational endeavors toward the history of photography for example a lecture series in Cincinnati you also produced a lot of videos of interviews with artists you could just name a few of those and sort of what brought that to mind pursuing necessarily your own work you were really interested in spreading the word about photographers that had really a significant contribution well yeah that's a good topic I remember I was taking a class taught by Clarence White and the son of Clarence White he's Clarence White Jr the son of Clarence White one of the photo secessionists and this is before I knew photography before I took the course at OU on the history of photography and he talked about growing up New York as a little kid and he talked about his dad mom and dad having folks over for dinner and the folks that came for dinner would be Alfred Stiglitz and Edward Steichen and those are people I didn't know much about until I took the history of photography and I found out those were the photographers of photography back in those days and then later I was a part owner of a non-profit gallery in Cincinnati a photography gallery and then we decided to do some video interviews so we contacted several photographers around the country and they agreed to be interviewed and this was 35 years ago and a lot of these folks were deceased but we interviewed Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke Elliott Porter Willard Van Dyke was one of the founders of Group F64 which was a very well known group of photographers who members were Edward Weston and Ansel Adams and we interviewed Barbara Morgan and Arthur Tress and then later about seven or eight years ago we started Photofocus and Mary Ellen's now the director of Photofocus and that's the photography festival in Cincinnati that comes up every two years and every other October we've had about 60 exhibits 60 photography exhibits in Cincinnati so it's been very successful and we've had a lot of cooperation from the museums and universities and for-profit galleries so it's coming up again in 2018 so mark your calendar and come to Cincinnati Any other questions? I'm actually going to ask a really quick follow up question to education what's striking about the photographs is that the 360 panoramic perspective captures a perspective that the human eye can't naturally see and being in the university setting I wonder how you hope or would like students to interact with the photographs to view them, to learn from them That's a good question when people look at the photographs and it's more apparent the materials they appear very distorted straight lines oh there's falling water there's one of the gaudy churches and you see there are a lot of arches well those are actually straight lines but the panoramic camera makes them look curved and people think it's distorted but actually that's how the human eye sees when you look at a building you look at that wall and you know that that's a square wall but your eye doesn't see it that way if you were to say to look at this beam here in your mind you know it's a straight beam but if you were to point to the corner of the beam and place it all the way over what you find is you make an arc with your hand so the panoramic lens sees that arc but when you look at it with your eyeball your brain knows it's a straight line so you see it as a straight line so in fact that was kind of a problem in the early days of photography photographers would make a camera and they would just use a simple magnifying lens and they would take a picture of if this was a wall or this was a window they'd take a picture of the window with this simple lens and when they made the print they'd find out that it wasn't a square window it was kind of barrel shaped they had a curve at the bottom and the top and the sides and they said well that's not what a window looks like it has straight lines on it so what they did was they corrected the lens they manufactured the lens in such a way that it took out that curvature and that was called a rectilinear lens because that's what people want to see when they look at a photograph that's Barcelona you know this picture is what you've been talking about because I remember standing there looking at Gaudi's masterpiece and when you're in front of the main altar I mean your eye span is lucky to take in that one circle there with the main altar but you don't see the depth and the perception of that this picture is so perfect for what you just described well you can see on the right side there's a dark doorway and the same one is over on this side and that's actually the doorway behind you as you stand there and look at the altar so when you stand there you see the altar, you turn to your left and you see this arch turn to your right and see that arch and turn around behind you and you see the doorway that leads into the crypt who's going to go to Barcelona do your homework and read about that church before you go there because in that church the entire history of Christianity can be found every minute all right well please join me in thanking Tom again and I hope everybody has time to visit the exhibit and look at the book that is in the exhibit thank you so much thank you we saw some cookies back there too yes also please help yourself to refreshments okay thanks