Nemeth recalls his big bang moment with VR: "I've been taking photos since I was a kid, but I was always frustrated by not being able to capture the whole scene. Then in late 1995 I downloaded a couple of QuickTime VR scenes. Kaboom! I fell out of my chair! At last I could shoot everything and not just grab bits and pieces."

Nemeth soon picked himself (and his VR dreams) up off the floor with a project he called Sydney VR. Using a combination of specially modified 35mm cameras and software tools from Apple and Adobe, he set out to create a VR tour of his home city.

Nemeth worked on his ambitious project over the next year and along the way he became something of an expert on the intricacies of panorama creation in general, and Apple's QuickTime VR in particular. By the time his 118-image Sydney VR Web site made its debut early in 1997, Nemeth had published articles on his techniques, taught multimedia classes at the University of New South Wales and contributed to an Apple training course CD-ROM for QuickTime VR developers.

Creating the perfect VR panorama requires a combination of meticulous photography and great patience during the panorama image assembly process.

When he's shooting in low light conditions (such as for the War Memorial interiors), Nemeth uses a tripod to hold his custom camera rig. If he's shooting an outdoor scene containing people, he prefers to use a monopod with his Leica camera and 16mm lens because it allows him to work more quickly.

The extreme wide-angle nature of the Leica lens allows Nemeth to capture a 360 degree panorama in just six images. If he wants to include the view directly overhead, he points the camera straight up and takes a seventh shot.

As anyone who has ever tried to cobble together a panorama in Photoshop can tell you, it is a very challenging task balancing the light values in the scanned images and 'stitching' the frames together. Nemeth, who does all his work on a Mac, uses a freeware Photoshop plug-in to help him assemble the images.

"I use the plug-in to map each of the six images so that I get a section which is the inside of a sphere and then I join them up", he explains. "I use Photoshop to create a set of layer masks and I paint on the layer masks to paint out areas I want to join. If I make a mistake or if things aren't lining up properly, it's easy to undo and start over again. Using the layer mask also gives me complete control over the amount of feathering that goes between each image."

One of Nemeth's trademarks is the perfectly rendered crowd scene. "Sometimes, you'll have a person right at the edge of one shot, but not in the next. If I did a straight blend, the person might have their arm or half their body cut off. But by using a layer mask, I can paint around the edge of the person and have the blend point right at that edge. What makes my work unique is that I can take shots of people walking straight past the camera and blend them in a way that is not obvious at all."

Another Nemeth trademark is the stereo sound track he includes with many of his scenes. "Most of the time people don't even notice I'm there," he says, describing people's reactions to his VR endeavors. "Although recording the stereo sounds is not too easy to do and remain discreet!"

Despite Nemeth's success thus far, the self-styled "VR gun for hire" actually prefers the (ironic) freedom of having a full-time day job: "[It] frees me up to shoot what I want, which is mainly unposed candid shots of people going about their lives - something you can still do in Australia!" he notes wryly.

As for the future, Nemeth doesn't have to look too far for inspiration: "Did you know that Sydney is over 100 kilometers across and yet only has 3 million residents!? The suburban sprawl results in a lot of visual strangeness which is just begging to be photographed!"

To see more of Andrew Nemeth's work, point your browser to www.nemeng.com.