Joby Catto

Pro Expert

England, UK, Europe
Views: 97,911
About Joby

I'm an experienced, knowledgeable and professional panoramic photographer and producer, with more than a decade creating commercial 360° content.

I'm passionate about all aspects of 360° content; producing conventional photographic, stereographic, animated and video panoramic projects, as well as object VRs. Delivering virtual reality (VR) content for a range of sectors – amongst retail, education, hospitality, tourism, security, industrial and the arts – is what drives me, especially as 360/VR° and immersive content is starting to see widespread mainstream adoption across a range of media and devices.

I've 20 years of professional design industry experience in print, digital and screen; working on 3D design, visualisation and imagery since the late 90s. I've specialised in digital, panoramic and immersive photography since 2005; equally stimulated by the creative and technical skills required to deliver excellent quality work. I have also been a member of the International VR Photography Association for many years.

I founded and led a specialist virtual reality team in one of the UK's leading shopper marketing agencies, delivering innovative VR solutions for brands and retailers including Disney, GlaxoSmithKline, L’Oreal, Thorntons, Boots, Argos, Homebase, Sky and Asda WalMart. These were deployed as desktop, mobile and offline solutions; including dedicated immersive life-sized walk-in ‘Virtual Labs’ in London and Leeds. 

My professional work covers a wide range of subjects and categories; my personal work reflects recurrent themes of placement, enclosure, context, texture and light. In all cases I aim to capture both a moment in time, and a sense of place which provokes an emotional response from the viewer. 

Realism, accuracy and detail are key to compelling 360° content. The immersive nature of panoramic photography enables the viewer to be placed in the centre of the subject matter… achieving what generations of visual artists before have striven to achieve.

My first attempt at a  360° image was in 1991, inspired by David Hockney's photo-montage work from the early 80s. The process (with a point and shoot film camera) was hit-and-miss, and the final result less than impressive. I put my panoramic photographic career on pause. Experiencing the earliest QTVRs in the late 90s amazed me and piqued my curiosity, but it wasn't until RAW-based digital photography in the mid 2000s allowed me to combine my interest in CG and photography, and I plunged head-first in to a 360° visual world.