Kevin Zhang

Can you tell us about the moment you first realized panorama photography could be your primary focus?

I was back home in Shanghai after college graduation in 2023. During an afternoon with my dad we were at this really high up cafe in puxi which had a terrific view of the bund. I didn’t have a wide enough lens at the time, so I figured I could try to take a bunch of photos and stitch them into a panorama.

That was my first panorama, which turned out rather well, so I decided to do more.

Not a particularly grand story, unfortunately.

How did your background in programming and visual effects influence your approach to photography?

Actually, for the majority of my photography history it didn’t influence me much.

I started photography at age 9 or so, at a stupidly young age. My dad got me into it. Looking back I was never a prodigy, I don’t like the photos I’ve taken for the first 8 years of my photography. As the saying goes, the first ten thousand photos you take are your worst, but it was a hundred thousand for me.

I started programming in middle school, but half way through high school I swapped coding for film. Film was my main thing for the next few years, all the way through the end of college. It was photography and coding that helped me grow in film pretty fast; most of the technical shenanigans for photography carry to film well, and programming helped with movie visual effects just because a lot of the concepts are similar.

Fast forward to that 2023 puxi cafe, and panorama has me hooked into photography again. All that film and vfx experience flips over to helping me with panos. A lot of the workflows for good panos and the mindset you need to have for them are the exact same for vfx and film. In VFX for example, working a week on a 5 second shot is pretty common. Most photographers would scoff at taking days to produce one panorama image, but I was already used to it.

It’s a very long winded way to say that all of my skillsets helped build other skillsets in a cyclical manner.

What draws you to urban landscapes and city density as your main subject?

I believe it’s because I’m an introvert and that I like complicated stuff. I like the sort of images where you can spend hours looking at every single detail in a where’s Waldo manner. For city density, vfx and film editing are both very solitary jobs if you work on them freelance. An image of a dense city is a well populated one. I often set my own images as my desktop wallpaper to remind myself that I’m not too lonely in this world.

Kevin Zhang | Top

How do you navigate the technical challenges of panorama photography, especially with moving elements like people or light?

You just have to try a loooooooot. If a photo walk with 300 shutter attempts nets you 20 good photos, for panorama you’re going to have to take at least thousands a day. After you gain some experience with it you develop your own techniques, and you kind of have to since panoramas are a very underdeveloped field. I have like 5 camera grip methods I’ve found that make handheld panoramas more reliable (I rarely ever use a tripod), and I’ve learned a lot more about how to follow people and light for a more reliable image. There’s still far more stuff I haven’t discovered yet I’m sure, it’ll just take a billion photos to get there.

You’ve mentioned your love for clarity and high resolution — do you see your work more as documentation or interpretation?

Gosh that’s a great question, I have no idea. It’s a bit like documentation because all of my stuff is candid, but you can also argue it’s like interpretation because the images go far beyond human eyesight in angle of view and resolution.

I’d say that it’s a bit of both, but I’d lean more towards interpretation because reality is sometimes boring and high resolution images can make reality more interesting.

Kevin Zhang | Top

In what ways have both your experience with dyslexia and your early exposure to technology and anime shaped the way you approach visual creativity today?

When you’re told as a kid that you’re dyslexic, it imprints on you. All your peers are reading and drawing, but your teachers say you’d suck at both, so you’d find something else to do. Naturally I went full on for computers. I played many hours of flash games as a kid and tried to memorize all the intricacies in Windows XP and iOS. I watched many hours of YouTube videos on technology and a lot of cartoons and anime. At a certain point there was a visual portal of sorts in my head that I could always pull visual ideas from. It was like a never ending Cartoon Network stream but just for myself.

There’s a part of me that wonders if where I am now is actually due to dyslexia or being raised as a dyslexic. I do think dyslexia has given me a lot of visual talents; I can’t write or express thoughts on graphical art in writing but I sure can feel it in my bones. That aforementioned CN stream has certainly given me an endless amount of ideas and stories to think about. But the nurture part of dyslexia made me look at digital screens for the majority of my youth, and perhaps had a bigger impact. All those tech videos taught me how to solve very difficult problems after I got older (like panoramas). All that media probably impacted most of my color tastes and aesthetics. I don’t think I’ll ever be sick of a good, vibrant color palette. That has to come from anime somehow.

I wish I could speak more succinctly about this; I question my brain all the time. I feel my own creative work already serves as an outlet for my thoughts on art and technology far better than words can express. Panorama photography is just one part of it.