I was educated as a city planner and an architect. I am not practising any of these professions anymore due to the fact that they do not offer enough freedom during the process of creation. I later turned into an artist using mainly photography as a visual expression tool and a professional photographer shooting architecture and cityscapes. I always had a deep interest in urban photography, un/consciously referring to my educational past. I kept panoramic photography always in my orbit of most used visualisation apparatuses and techniques, in order to be able to construct more comprehensive urban depictions. Roofs, terraces of skyscrapers, observations decks, towers of any kind have usually been my typical platforms, where I have created a remarkably large collection of global cityscapes. It was and still is too expensive to hire a helicopter for a shoot that does not guarantee a commercial return. While I will keep using the above techniques, I feel like I entered a new era in my professional photography practice as I recently acquired a drone. Drones are not that easy to operate and that affordable to buy, if you intend to go highly professional with hires camera bodies on-board. You have to have an operator flying an octocopter and yourself in command of the operator telling him/her where to go and what angle to give, in order to end up with the "right" photograph. I preferred a low-priced quadcopter with a rather lower resolution camera, since I can control both the flying gismo and the camera myself. I can now send my eye to the sky, to a sky tier that I personally call "dronosphere", a layer that is roughly in between 50-150 metres. This height gives me a particular viewpoint in between street view and map view. This paper will discuss if drone photography can bring a novel visual language to cityscape and / or street photography.

Smart phones are ubiquitous; light, portable and indispensable. The spatial, perceptive and visual connections among scene, subject and photographer are different, compared to a regular camera. This fact enables the photographer to focus on different topics, try practices s/he has not tried before. Mobile devices change the way we create, edit, sequence and share photography. When you do street photography with a smart phone camera, one of the advantages is that people do not really understand where you aim at and what you photograph. They do not react as consciously as they would in front of a regular camera. The reason is; almost all people, including locals and tourists, own a smart phone and taking a snap with them is very common practice for all. Okabe and Ito (2006) argue that: "The camera phone is a more ubiquitous presence, and is used for more personal, less objectified viewpoint and sharing among intimates. It tends to be used more frequently as a kind of archive of a personal trajectory or viewpoint on the world, a collection of fragments of everyday life." Ease of use seems to make smart phone recording as one of the "sine qua non" practices of photography. There are many documentary photographers, reporters, journalists, professional photographers and even artists, film directors who take this apparatus seriously and use it. Some camera makers, like Samsung, are aware of the power of mobile imaging (described as "quantum imagery" by Fred Ritchin) and started to produce cameras 3G / 4G connectivity. Before the digital revolution, the percentage of the "amateur" photographers was relatively less as compared to the digital era. Shooting with film was more difficult as analogue processes allowed less room for errors. After the launch of cheap compact digital cameras amateurs generated more self-confidence in imaging since they were offered the possibility of fixing any mistakes by just erasing any faulty photo. The introduction of cameras into smart phones was yet another dimension at which people felt even more poised to take photos, since the tool is not a "professional" apparatus with which you are expected to create expert results. In the light of above facts, I think it would not be wrong to say that phone cameras give a personalized power to their users. Nowadays, with the possibilities offered by social media tools, regular people contribute to the making of their local and global histories with the "amateur" personal images they make, which partially shape their identities. This can defined as power of the individual, using visual imagination as a tool. This paper aims to discuss how mobile digital imaging alters the creation, perception and aesthetics of visuality. Contemporary photographic culture is definitely more intricately intertwined with popular culture as compared to photography in the 20th century and this should not be interpreted as a weakness but strength, when used consciously.

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Maestro -3D group calendar visualizer aims at handling multiple schedules and highlighting common free times. One of the most powerful skills of Maestro is scalability according to the number of group members, which can be up to 18 users. The use of color and shape intends to create a more lucid picture of an organization's schedule, as opposed to traditional calendars which can overwhelm the user with information.The goal is not to produce yet another calendar application, but to define an interactive information visualization technique. This work concentrates on highlighting the relevant information, using primitive shapes and color differentiation to avoid a complicated depiction.

This paper describes the creative as well as computational processes involved in the creation of a generative architectural construct destined to become the virtual campus of a Real Life University in Second Life®. Designed around a core spiral structure the virtual building re-configures itself based upon user demand, adding exhibition and meeting areas as well as conference halls and auditoriums, as and when required. Thus, a user-centric, emergent, dynamic construct has been implemented for a virtual campus, which evolves and changes over time and usage. The ensuing design system also attempts to configure itself based upon the nature of activity undertaken within it: Thus spaces required for survey based learning spread themselves out over the "shallow" horizontal axis, whereas areas of research and deeper levels of inquiry utilize the "deeper" vertical axis in a visual representation of different strategies of learning and levels of epistemological inquiry.2009 International Conference on CyberWorlds 978-0-7695-3791-7/09 $26.00