[April 15, 2013] St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editors Desk column Tweet Apr 13, 2013 (St. Louis Post-Dispatch - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- How does a highly accomplished, creative photographer convey the movements of people competing over time at an overnight climbing contest This atypical competition warranted unusual visual storytelling, which you can see on this page and in greater detail on the Post-Dispatch website at stltoday.com/pictures. Look closely at the abstract painting of a photograph and you will see shadows along the wall and wild streaks of white light. Those shadows are people, climbing while wearing head lamps. The streaks are from their lamps and evidence of their progress in this midnight contest. The dynamic image was created by Post-Dispatch sports photographer Chris Lee, whom you might see wearing his trademark backward baseball cap at Busch Stadium, the Edward Jones Dome or Scottrade Center, documenting our local teams with skills that rate among the best in the nation. Lee is the primary photographer for sporting events in St. Louis. He started at the Post-Dispatch in 1999. Since then he's covered every big sports event from championships to other classic moments. Earlier this year, he won the sweepstakes award in the 2012 Associated Press Managing Editors contest for his dramatic photo of Cardinals pitcher Jaime Garcia in playoff action. On April 6, Lee decided to cover the second annual Halfway 2 Hell climbing competition, a 12-hour overnight endurance rock climbing competition at the Upper Limits climbing gym in Maryland Heights. Covering the same sports teams year after year, he strives to approach his beat in fresh ways. This year during the Cardinals spring training camp, he created 360-degree panoramic images of the team's practice. The images were a different way to give fans access to their Redbirds. The technology for displaying 360-degree panoramic photos has been available for almost 20 years. Apple unveiled QuickTime VR (Virtual Reality) in 1994. NBC used the technology to create panoramas of the crime scene in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. A typical panoramic photo is created by stitching together multiple images, each taken in a different direction, until the entire space is recorded. The photographer never appears in the picture because he/she stays behind the camera for each exposure. With a fish-eye lens, a panorama can be done in as few as four pictures. However, this night panorama is composed of about 30 photographs, each a two-minute exposure. These images were combined into multiple sections in Adobe Photoshop and then all of the sections were stitched as one panoramic image with software called PTGui. As a companion to this panoramic image, Lee employed a new technology to take this a step further and created an interactive 360-degree panoramic video that plays simultaneously while you explore it. Each frame of the 360-degree climbing video is composed of six images, all taken at the same time, and stitched in PTGui. To create a one-minute video clip takes 900 frames (played back at 15 frames per second.) At six separate pictures per frame, this equals 11,280 pictures and about 24 gigabytes of data. Additional challenges include how to mount a camera that sees in all directions at all times but doesn't show the tripod holding the camera. The solution was to hang the camera from the ceiling on thin strands of fishing line. Creation of 360-degree panoramic images is not limited to professional camera setups. A 99-cent iPhone app called 360 Panorama from Occipital does a very good job. Lee has covered major sporting events that involve raising a championship banner or trophy before throngs of fans. The rock-climbing competition, which had 29 teams and 58 competitors, was lesser known. One video on the Post-Dispatch website depicts the milk-crate stacking competition, in which the winner stacked 22 crates. While it is less familiar to many sports fans than a walk-off home run, the milk-crate stacking video is alluring and remarkable. So look for Lee next time you rove the stands of a local sports stadium. And we can assure you that he will continue to devise new ways and places to bring visual storytelling to our readers. Post-Dispatch photo editor Lynden Steele contributed to this column. ___ (c)2013 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Visit the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at www.stltoday.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]