Ran Garrigus Wins RMB City Photography Contest!

I'm happy to announce that Cao Fei and the staff of RMB City have chosen Ran Garrigus a winner in the RMB Photography contest, taking the prize in the "Synthetic Virtual" category with the striking image below, "Planet RMB City".

"My motivation to make this image," Mr. Garrigus tells me, "followed reading Cao Fei's RMB City Manifesto, in which her final point is 'The World'. In there, she explains that one aim of the project is to bring to participants in the project the 'experience' of 'the whole World'. Depicting RMB City as a planet, as a singular urban ecology amidst a world of water, was my attempt to interpret the manifesto visually." Ran's challenge was realizing that concept in a screenshot:

"The process, one I indirectly learned from Thaumata Strangelove (whose "Tiny Planet" photo set on Flickr is amazing), was a bit trying. First, a bug with the client (related to glow and high-res images) led me to scrap my first attempt after taking about eighty pictures.

"Second time around, I took more than a hundred images in a way that slipped the bug. The images basically provide a full 360 degrees of coverage, which allowed me to take them into Microsoft's Image Composite Editor to create a panorama, and then I used the open source Hugin program to create a stereographic projection, which resulted in the above."

Comments

[Osprey]

A wonderful image, Ran. Congratulations!