In the years since Nemeth has put his VR skills to work on projects for the Art Gallery of NSW, the Sydney Morning Herald, brewer Lion-Nathan and most recently, he says "I did a large project for the War Memorial in Canberra which made it to the semi-finals in the Telstra Internet Awards Broadband category."

Creating the perfect VR panorama requires meticulous photography in the first instance and then great patience during the panorama image assembly process.

When he's shooting in low light conditions (such as for the War Memorial interiors), Nemeth uses a tripod to hold his custom camera rig. If he's shooting an outdoor scene containing people, he prefers to use a monopod with his Leica camera and 16mm lens because it allows him to work more quickly.

The extreme wide angle nature of the Leica lens allows Nemeth to capture a 360 degree panorama in just six images. If he wants to include the view directly overhead, he points the camera straight up and takes a seventh shot.

As anyone who has ever tried to cobble together a panorama in Photoshop can tell you, it is a very challenging task balancing the light values in the scanned images and 'stitching' the frames together. Nemeth, who does all his work on a Mac, uses a freeware Photoshop plug-in to help him assemble the images.

"I use the plug-in to map each of the six images so that I get a section which is the inside of a sphere and then I join them up", he explains. "I use Photoshop to create a set of layer masks and I paint on the layer masks to paint out areas I want to join. If I make a mistake or if things aren't lining up properly, it's easy to undo and start over again. Using the layer mask also gives me complete control over the amount of feathering that goes between each image."

One of Nemeth's trademarks is the perfectly rendered crowd scene. "Sometimes, you'll have a person right at the edge of one shot, but not in the next. If I did a straight blend, the person might have their arm or half their body cut off. But by using a layer mask, I can paint around the edge of the person and have the blend point right at that edge. What makes my work unique is that I can take shots of people walking straight past the camera and blend them in a way that is not obvious at all."

To see more of Andrew Nemeth's work, point your browser at: www.nemeng.com