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We last talked to Burger about his amazing cave project several years ago. In that interview, he stated his goal as the Herculean task of photographing all the caves in Slovenia’s vast system, which he describes as a kind of sanctuary, a place where he feels “calm inside the caverns and underground passages”.

Burger shoots more than caves though; his website contains scores and scores of panoramas taken around the entire country of Slovenia. And he travels frequently, most recently to South America last November, where he gave a lecture about panoramas at a symposium in Sao Paulo and took some time to travel to the famous Iguassu Falls.

It’s about time we caught up with you Bostjan! What have you been up to professionally since we last spoke to you about you Slovenia caves project?

It is hard to define what my professional work - which makes money - is and that of my interests, which consume my earned money. How to say...as an example: all my VR cave projects are my personal project and financed from my own budget, which was earned with my work with informatics. Some of my VR projects have become involved in national and technically interesting projects. My web site, whose goal was to be an educational Internet tool for school classes, had a better reputation in tourism than the National tourist board only two years ago. Officials called me in at that time and asked to use part of my VR panoramas on the National tourist board web site exclusively. The result was so good that I got the order to visualize all Slovenian spa and wellness centers in the year 2004. I completed that job in four months.

The Technological Park that was in charge of the Geodetic Institute and was to prepare the digital map of Slovenia proposed that I join the team with the VR panoramas that I had geo-referenced with the use of GIS, and because of my familiarity with the landscape. I had previous references and experience with the interactive multimedia CD-ROM guide to Slovenian waterfalls, which I published in 1998. The result of the cooperation with the Technological Park and the Institute was the coverage of the country with digital maps in scales from 1:25.000 to 1:300.000. Hotspots are all over the map, from which you can switch to a virtual tour. When you move the pano, the field of view also moves over the map, a very nice product.

The largest mobile phone company in Slovenia accepted my idea of using panos within mobile phones as 'info-panoramas'. Even though the resolution of mobile phones is very low, the effect of the presentation was very nice as the VRs were geo-referenced, meaning that when the user picks a location, the phone will guide him there – from virtual reality to reality. As the capacity and power of mobile phones develops, this method may become accepted worldwide.

You’ve mentioned that you are a geographer first (as opposed to a panographer). Unfortunately, I’m unfamiliar with your professional background and how you became interested in panoramic photography. Can you give us an overview?

I have traveled all over Europe, Russia, spent a couple of months in China, etc. I always try to travel as if on an expedition and not like a tourist.

I did documents with travel notes, seeking historical and geomorphologic features and documenting them with my camera, doing some so-called cycloramas. However, my prime education was informatics - computer science. I started learning about computers when we needed to insert the code with the perforated cards - it was in 1979 and I was still a pupil in primary school. When I was in grammar school, I was as a programmer involved in some serious projects and by the time I went to the University of Electronics and Computer Science, I was already retired as a programmer - 'dried up'. Then I finally found my interest - geography and hydrology with waterfalls. I decided to explore every single stream in Slovenia and documented a few hundred waterfalls and springs. It was through that work of documenting hydrology that I met Don Bain, who was a geographer, and I immediately accepted his idea of documenting the landscape with VR panoramas and enriching them with geographical data as GPS coordinates and notes about the location.

I presented my panoramas almost exclusively with Java, as QTVR was exotic and not popular among PC users (until a few years ago few people used Macs here in Slovenia). The year 2001 was a milestone for me when I contacted Hans Nyberg about his idea of fullscreen panoramas. Hans inspired me and I started to publish fullscreen VR panoramas beside Java previews. My web site was already highly ranked among Slovenian web users, so QuickTime became popular here too. Nowadays I have over 4000 java VR panos and over 1400 fullscreen QTVR panos on my web site.

Your website features some new panos taken in Argentina and Brazil. What were you doing in South America?

The year 2004 was quite busy with my travel 'expeditions'. I was in Egypt in April and when I came home, a letter from Brazil was waiting in my mailbox. It was the invitation to join the FILE (Electronic Language International Festival) and the symposium in Sao Paulo. As I am not an artist, I thought that the invitation was a mistake, so I mailed the organizers and asked about the purpose of the invitation. They replied that the year 2004 was the first year FILE was launching panoramas. Organizers selected some VR producers and invited them to join the event. The festival ran from November 23rd to December 12th, a long period to me just to join the event, so I decided to explore the metropolis of Sao Paulo as much as possible and document it with VRs.

What was your lecture about?

I gave a lecture about the geography and use of VR panoramas. I was surprised about the great interest over VR panoramas in Brazil, and equally surprised at the absence of panographers from Brazil as I know some very good ones. On the Symposium a major interest was the use of VR panoramas as a documentation of museum exhibitions. In my lecture I presented the Virtual Reality exhibition of City Museum of Ljubljana, which I did in 1999. Panoramas from Helmut Koelbach, Jook Leung, Yunzen Liu and Peter Murphy were also presented in the gallery of the SESI tower, which were accessible to the general public and projected onto a big screen - very attractive.

As a VR photographer, what geographic location(s) were you most impressed with in South America?

My trip to Brazil was a high contrast between the jungle of a metropolis of 20 million people and the subtropical forest in the area of Iguassu National Park. My great interest and studies are waterfalls, so I was most impressed with the great cataract of the Iguassu River, consisting of many waterfalls with a total width of 2700 m and a height of about 72 m (the height varies between 40 and 90m). The water flow varies between 300 cubic meters/sec and 6500 cubic meters/sec with an average flow of 1500 cubic meters/sec - really impressive and a lifetime 'must see'. The Guarani word 'Iguassu' means 'Great Water'. The river rises in the area of Serra do Mar and runs for 1320 km through the state of Paraná before it flows into the Paraná River at Puerto do Iguazu, where the three borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay converge.

When I was in Sao Paulo I decided to take a tour of Iguassu National Park, which involved taking a flight from Sao Paulo to Foz de Iguassu. All the flights were overbooked, so I had to endure a 16-hour bus drive to Foz de Iguacu. I left behind all my luggage, notebook and SLR camera in my hotel room in Sao Paulo - except my compact Nikon Coolpix with wide adapter and two Sandisk Ultra II 512 Mb cards.

The area of Iguassu National Park is a subtropical rain forest - and the there was always a slight rain or a shower from the falls, even with the short moments of sunshine. As I had no tripod, all my shots were made handheld and I wiped my lens after every shot. My idea was a geographical 'VR note' so I did not annoy myself with achieving a superb result. The compact camera had an option to record short movies so I recorded some movies and later extracted the sound and added it to the panos.

I spent two full days in the area: one day on the Brazilian side and one on the Argentina side of the Iguassu River. I just wish that I had more time, but I had 16 hours of bus drive back to SP and a fixed flight back to Europe.

Your pano of Sao Paulo really captures the immensity of the city from on high – where was it shot?

I wanted to get a panorama of the whole city and it was recommended that I visit the Italian building in the old downtown of the city. The top of the building is accessible to the public with a small fee. This pano is a partial panorama (about 300-degrees) and made from 42 shots, just walking around the enclosure on the top. Simple but quite hard to stitch.

Did you encounter any problems in Sao Paulo, a city known for its high crime?

Sao Paulo is really a huge city. I didn’t use the public transportation much although there is an excellent metro system. I walked over 100 km during my stay there and even visited some 'unsafe' areas. I heard that Sao Paulo is even more dangerous than Rio but even with my camera and shooting panos all over the city, I had no real troubles.

I saw a group of teenagers spraying graffiti and shot the pano. They noticed me and were a bit angry that I captured them, but I am a diplomatic person and calmed them down. A trickier situation was capturing the police officers but I was fast enough to finish before they realized what I was doing... this is the advantage of handheld capturing of panos!

You shot many panos of your travels; in your opinion, which is the best and why?

I cannot answer this question properly. From a technical point of view, my panos are not perfect. I shoot mainly handheld panos and shoot quite a high number every year.

I like France. It is a huge and beautiful country and not so far away from Slovenia. I shot many panos there in recent years. I like my recent uploaded location of Roussillion, which is a small village of Vaucluse département of Provence in southern France. The village is famous for its ochre rocks with 17 different color nuances. I was there with my family and 'captured' on pano my wife and daughters. Many of my VR panoramas are somehow part of my 'family' albums.

From South America, my favorite pano is the one that I didn't even hope would be a successful stitching. It is from the middle of the Iguassu River. The hi-speed boat was moving (look on the engines - 2x 200 KW), it was raining and water from the waterfalls was spraying, we were all soaked to the skin. I shot a fast 'riffle' of photos in 360 degree with no real intention that it would be successful.

On another topic, how far along are you in your goal of shooting Slovenia’s entire cave system?

The cave photography is one of the most difficult. Even to get a single good photo is not easy and quality underground panos need a lot of experience. Even though caves are my passion, it is really a slow process, but today I am several times faster with this technique than I was a couple years ago. My last upload of caves was the Pisani rov, which I finished in March.

I hope to capture as many caves as possible but sometimes I feel that after each new visualized cave, another hundred are discovered. I have photographed ten cave systems so far with over 200 panos covering over 20 km eye-to-eye of the underground galleries but there are still 8000 caves waiting.

My experience is that people are not familiar with the caves; it is a very abstract world for many Internet users. It is fun, but I have received a number of mails with the question if the underground world I present with VRs is real.

Read more about Bostjan Burger and 'The Underground Caves of Slovenia'.

Email: burger[at]burger[dot]si