Panoramic photography

The term has also been applied to a photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio, like the familiar letterbox format in wide-screen video.

An image made with an ultra wide-angle fisheye lens covering the normal film frame of 1:1.33 is not automatically considered to be a panorama.

The device of the panorama existed in painting, particularly in murals as early as A.D. 20 in those found in Pompeii,[1][2][3] as a means of generating an immersive 'panoptic' experience of a vista, long before the advent of photography.

In the century prior to the advent of photography, and from 1787, with the work of Robert Barker,[4] it reached a pinnacle of development in which whole buildings were constructed to house 360° panoramas,[5] and even incorporated lighting effects and moving elements.

His camera, the Megaskop, used curved plates and added the crucial feature of set gears, offering a relatively steady panning speed.

[7] As a result, the camera properly exposed the photographic plate, avoiding unsteady speeds that can create an unevenness in exposure, called banding.

[12] After the advent of wet-plate collodion process, photographers would take anywhere from two to a dozen of the ensuing albumen prints and piece them together to form a panoramic image (see: Segmented).

While William Stanley Jevons' wet-collodion Panorama of Port Jackson, New South Wales, from a high rock above Shell Cove, North Shore survived undiscovered until 1953 in his scrap-book of 1857,[13] some of the most famous early panoramas were assembled this way by George N. Barnard, a photographer for the Union Army in the American Civil War in the 1860s.

His work provided vast overviews of fortifications and terrain, much valued by engineers, generals, and artists alike.

(see Photography and photographers of the American Civil War)[citation needed] In 1875, through remarkable effort, Bernard Otto Holtermann and Charles Bayliss coated twenty-three wet-plates measuring 56 by 46 centimetres to record a sweeping view of Sydney Harbour.

[20] More portable and simple to operate, and with the advantage of holding several panoramic views on the one roll, these cameras were enthusiastically deployed around the turn of the century by such photographers as the American adventurer Melvin Vaniman, who popularised the medium in Australia where it was taken up by both Pictorialist and postcard photographers, such as Robert Vere Scott,[21] Richard T. Maurice (1859-1909), H.H.

[24] Made in 1890 in Berlin, Germany, by Rudolf Stirn, the Wonder Panoramic Camera needed the photographer for its motive power.

The Periphote had a spring-wound clock motor that rotated, and the inside barrier held the roll of film and its take-up spool.

The Russian "Spaceview FT-2", originally an artillery spotting camera, produced wider negatives, 12 exposures on a 36-exposure 35 mm film.

APS or 35 mm cameras produce cropped images in a panoramic aspect ratio using a small area of film.

With a flat image plane, 90° is the widest field of view that can be captured in focus and without significant wide-angle distortion or vignetting.

[citation needed] Examples of this type of camera are: Taiyokoki Viscawide-16 ST-D (16 mm film),[28] Siciliano Camera Works Pannaroma (35mm, 1987[29]), Hasselblad X-Pan (35 mm, 1998), Linhof 612PC, Horseman SW612, Linhof Technorama 617, Tomiyama Art Panorama 617 and 624, and Fuji G617 and GX617 (Medium format (film)).

The panomorph lens provides a full hemispheric field of view with no blind spot, unlike catadioptric lenses.

[citation needed] With digital photography, the most common method for producing panoramas is to take a series of pictures and stitch them together.

Ideally, in order to correctly stitch images together without parallax error, the camera must be rotated about the center of its lens entrance pupil.

Lens- and mirror-based (catadioptric) cameras consist of lenses and curved mirrors that reflect a 360-degree field of view into the lens' optics.

The image, a reflection of the surface on the mirror, is in the form of a doughnut to which software is applied in order to create a flat panoramic picture.

Through his fascination with human vision, his efforts to render a subjective view in his artworks resulted in the manual montaging of 10x15cm high-street-processed prints of (often several entire) 35mm films as a solution.

[38] He called the resulting cut-and-paste montages "joiners", and one of his most famous is "Pearblossom Highway", held by the Getty Museum.