"Be Here" at the Inauguration
by Ruth Gersh and Susan Wise
President Clinton's second inauguration was the first major real-time event for The Wire, AP's online news service. It was also the first time The Wire contributed original content to the "traditional" news report, thanks to an alert AP staffer visiting MacWorld in San Francisco while on vacation.
Chicago photo editor John Swart knew of The Wire's intention to present a 360-degree panoramic view of the inauguration. Existing technology requires a photographer to take 16-to-18 individual frames of a scene with the aid of a special tripod and then stitch them together in a computer to make the photo. That method limits the situations in which panoramas can be used, but we were looking forward to giving it a try.
At MacWorld, however, John found Be Here, a California company with a revolutionary new lens that allows photographers using a Nikon digital or film camera to take 360-degree panoramas in a single frame. John passed along the information, and in a matter of days, we got the lens.
We spent the day before inauguration taking test shots from various vantages at the Capitol with the help of Washington photographers Ron Edmonds and Doug Mills. Doug was able to get the cooperation of the CBS cameraman next to him, who agreed to let us mount the camera over the edge of the platform.
Doug's shot of the scene at the swearing-in couldn't have been better--and would have been impossible the way we had originally planned to shoot it. The freedom that the lens provided meant we could also shoot panoramas of the parade and that night's balls. Once Clinton was on his way to lunch, the camera went across town to photographer Rick Bowmer from Miami, who had been in a restricted area along the parade route since early morning.
In the end, The Wire displayed four pictures taken with the lens, and the resulting views really do allow the viewer to "be there." One of the images was even moved on PhotoStream for newspapers.
Ruth Gersh is AP's multimedia services editor and Susan Wise is photo editor for The Wire. E-mail, Ruth_Gersh@ap.org; phone, (212) 621-7227; fax, (212) 506-6279.