Panoramic photography is a technique of
photography
Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...
, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated
fields of view. It is sometimes known as ''wide format 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.
While there is no formal division between "
wide-angle" and "
panoramic" photography, "wide-angle" normally refers to a type of lens, but using this lens type does not necessarily make an image a panorama. An image made with an ultra wide-angle
fisheye lens
A fisheye lens is an ultra wide angle lens, ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong Distortion (optics), visual distortion intended to create a wide panorama, panoramic or Sphere#Hemisphere, hemispherical image. Fisheye lenses achieve extremel ...
covering the normal film frame of 1:1.33 is not automatically considered to be a panorama. An image showing a field of view approximating, or greater than, that of the
human eye – about 160° by 75° – may be termed panoramic. This generally means it has an aspect ratio of 2:1 or larger, the image being at least twice as wide as it is high. The resulting images take the form of a wide strip. Some panoramic images have aspect ratios of 4:1 and sometimes 10:1, covering fields of view of up to 360 degrees. Both the aspect ratio and coverage of field are important factors in defining a true panoramic image.
Photo-finishers and manufacturers of
Advanced Photo System (APS)
cameras use the word "panoramic" to define any
print format with a wide aspect ratio, not necessarily photos that encompass a large field of view.
History
The device of the panorama existed in painting, particularly in
murals as early as A.D. 20 in those found in
Pompeii
Pompeii ( ; ) was a city in what is now the municipality of Pompei, near Naples, in the Campania region of Italy. Along with Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Villa Boscoreale, many surrounding villas, the city was buried under of volcanic ash and p ...
, 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, it reached a pinnacle of development in which whole buildings were constructed to house 360° panoramas, and even incorporated lighting effects and moving elements. Indeed, the careers of one of the inventors of photography,
Daguerre, began in the production of popular panoramas and
dioramas.
The idea and longing to create a detailed cityscape without a paintbrush, inspired Friedrich von Marten. von Marten created panoramic daguerreotype by using a special panoramic camera that he created himself. The camera could capture a broad view on a single daguerreotype plate. In complete and vivid detail, a cityscape is laid out before the viewer.
The development of panoramic cameras was a logical extension of the nineteenth-century fad for the panorama. One of the first recorded patents for a panoramic camera was submitted by
Joseph Puchberger in
Austria
Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...
in 1843 for a hand-cranked, 150° field of view, 8-inch
focal length
The focal length of an Optics, optical system is a measure of how strongly the system converges or diverges light; it is the Multiplicative inverse, inverse of the system's optical power. A positive focal length indicates that a system Converge ...
camera that
exposed a relatively large
Daguerreotype, up to long. A more successful and technically superior panoramic camera was assembled the next year by Friedrich von Martens in
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
in 1844. His camera, the
Megaskop, used curved plates and added the crucial feature of set
gears, offering a relatively steady panning speed.
As a result, the camera properly exposed the photographic plate, avoiding unsteady speeds that can create an unevenness in exposure, called ''banding''. Martens was employed by Lerebours, a photographer/publisher. It is also possible that Martens camera was perfected before Puchberger patented his camera. Because of the high cost of materials and the technical difficulty of properly exposing the plates, Daguerreotype panoramas, especially those pieced together from several plates (see below) are rare.

After the advent of
wet-plate collodion process, photographers would take anywhere from two to a dozen of the ensuing
albumen print
Egg white is the clear liquid (also called the albumen or the glair/glaire) contained within an egg. In chickens, it is formed from the layers of secretions of the anterior section of the hen's oviduct during the passage of the egg. It forms aro ...
s and piece them together to form a panoramic image (''see:
Segmented''). This photographic process was technically easier and far less expensive than Daguerreotypes. 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, 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
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...
in the 1860s. His work provided vast overviews of fortifications and terrain, much valued by
engineers
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while consider ...
,
general
A general officer is an Officer (armed forces), officer of high rank in the army, armies, and in some nations' air force, air and space forces, marines or naval infantry.
In some usages, the term "general officer" refers to a rank above colone ...
s, and
artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...
s alike. (''see
Photography and photographers of the American Civil War'') 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.
Following the invention of
flexible film in 1888, panoramic photography was revolutionised. Dozens of cameras were marketed, many with
brand name
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's goods or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create and ...
s indicative of their era; such as the Pantascopic, (1862)
Cylindrograph survey camera (1884),
Kodak Panoram (1899),
Wonder Panoramic (1890), and
Cyclo-Pan (1970). 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, Richard T. Maurice (1859-1909), H.H. Tilbrook (1884-1937), and Harry Phillips (1873-1944).
Panoramic cameras and methods
Stereo Cyclographe
A camera with combined two-fixed focus panoramic camera in one mahogany-wooded box. The lenses were eight centimeters apart from each other with an indicator in between the lens to help the photographer set the camera level. A clock motor transported the nine-centimeter-wide film along with turning the shaft that rotated the camera. The camera could make a 9 × 80 cm pair that required a special viewer. These images were mostly used for mapping purposes.
Wonder Panoramic Camera
Made in 1890 in Berlin, Germany, by Rudolf Stirn, the Wonder Panoramic Camera needed the photographer for its motive power. A string, inside of the camera, hanging through a hole in the tripod screw, wound around a pulley inside the wooden box camera. To take a panoramic photo, the photographer swiveled the metal cap away from the lens to start the exposure. The rotation could be set for a full 360-degree view, producing an eighteen-inch-long negative.
Periphote
Built by Lumiere Freres of Paris in 1901. The Periphote had a spring-wound clock motor that rotated, and the inside barrier held the roll of film and its take-up spool. Attached to the body was a 55mm Jarret lens and a prism that directed the light through a half-millimeter-wide aperture at the film.
Short rotation

''Short rotation'', ''rotating lens'' and ''swing lens'' cameras have a lens that rotates around the camera lens's rear
nodal point and use a curved
film plane.
As the photograph is taken, the lens pivots around its rear nodal point while a slit exposes a vertical strip of film that is aligned with the axis of the lens. The exposure usually takes a fraction of a second. Typically, these cameras capture a field of view between 110° and 140° and an aspect ratio of 2:1 to 4:1. The images produced occupy between 1.5 and 3 times as much space on the
negative as the standard 24 mm x 36 mm
35 mm frame.
Cameras of this type include the
Widelux,
Noblex, and the
Horizon
The horizon is the apparent curve that separates the surface of a celestial body from its sky when viewed from the perspective of an observer on or near the surface of the relevant body. This curve divides all viewing directions based on whethe ...
. These have a negative size of approximately 24x58 mm. The Russian "Spaceview FT-2", originally an artillery spotting camera, produced wider negatives, 12 exposures on a 36-exposure 35 mm film.
Short rotation cameras usually offer few
shutter speed
In photography, shutter speed or exposure time is the length of time that the film or digital sensor inside the camera is exposed to light (that is, when the camera's shutter (photography), shutter is open) when taking a photograph.
The am ...
s and have poor focusing ability. Most models have a fixed focus lens, set to the
hyperfocal distance of the maximum aperture of the lens, often at around . Photographers wishing to photograph closer subjects must use a small
aperture to bring the foreground into focus, limiting the camera's use in low-light situations.
Rotating lens cameras produce distortion of straight lines. This looks unusual because the image, which was captured from a sweeping, curved perspective, is being viewed flat. To view the image correctly, the viewer would have to produce a sufficiently large print and curve it identically to the curve of the film plane. This distortion can be reduced by using a swing-lens camera with a standard focal length lens. The FT-2 has a 50 mm while most other 35 mm swing lens cameras use a wide-angle lens, often 28 mm.
Similar distortion is seen in panoramas shot with digital cameras using in-camera
stitching.
Full rotation
''Rotating panoramic cameras'', also called ''slit scan'' or ''scanning cameras'' are capable of 360° or greater degree of rotation. A clockwork or motorized mechanism rotates the camera continuously and pulls the film through the camera, so the motion of the film matches that of the image movement across the image plane.
Exposure is made through a narrow slit. The central part of the image field produces a very sharp picture that is consistent across the frame.
Digital
rotating line cameras image a 360° panorama line by line. Digital cameras in this style are the
Panoscan and Eyescan. Analogue cameras include the
Cirkut (1905),
Leme (1962), Hulcherama (1979),
Globuscope (1981), Seitz Roundshot (1988) and Lomography Spinner 360° (2010).
Fixed lens
''Fixed lens'' cameras, also called ''flatback'', ''wide view'' or ''wide field'', have fixed lenses and a flat image plane. These are the most common form of panoramic camera and range from inexpensive
APS cameras to sophisticated 6x17 cm and 6x24 cm
medium format cameras. Panoramic cameras using sheet film are available in formats up to 10 x 24 inches. APS or 35 mm cameras produce cropped images in a panoramic aspect ratio using a small area of film. Specialized 35 mm or medium format fixed-lens panoramic cameras use wide field lenses to cover an extended length as well as the full height of the film to produce images with a greater image width than normal.
Pinhole cameras of a variety of constructions can be used to make panoramic images. A popular design is the 'oatmeal box', a vertical cylindrical container in which the pinhole is made in one side and the film or photographic paper is wrapped around the inside wall opposite, and extending almost right to the edge of, the pinhole. This generates an egg-shaped image with more than 180° view.
Because they expose the film in a single exposure, fixed lens cameras can be used with
electronic flash, which would not work consistently with rotational panoramic cameras.
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. Lenses with an imaging angle approaching 120 degrees require a
center filter to correct vignetting at the edges of the image. Lenses that capture angles of up to 180°, commonly known as
fisheye lens
A fisheye lens is an ultra wide angle lens, ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong Distortion (optics), visual distortion intended to create a wide panorama, panoramic or Sphere#Hemisphere, hemispherical image. Fisheye lenses achieve extremel ...
es exhibit extreme geometrical distortion but typically display less brightness falloff than
rectilinear lenses.
Examples of this type of camera are: Taiyokoki Viscawide-16 ST-D (
16 mm film
16 mm film is a historically popular and economical Film gauge, gauge of Photographic film, film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film (about inch); other common film gauges include 8 mm film, 8 mm and 35mm movie film, 35 mm. It ...
), Siciliano Camera Works Pannaroma (35mm, 1987),
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.
Digital photography
Digital stitching of segmented panoramas

With digital photography, the most common method for producing panoramas is to take a series of pictures and stitch them together. There are two main types: the cylindrical panorama used primarily in stills photography and the spherical panorama used for virtual-reality images.
[Ang, Tom (2008). Fundamentals of Modern Photography. Octopus Publishing Group Limited. p174. .]
Segmented panoramas, also called
''stitched'' panoramas, are made by joining multiple photographs with slightly overlapping fields of view to create a panoramic image. Stitching software is used to combine multiple images. Ideally, in order to correctly stitch images together without
parallax error, the camera must be rotated about the center of its lens
entrance pupil.
Stitching software can correct some parallax errors and different programs seem to vary in their ability to correct parallax errors. In general specific panorama software seems better at this than some of the built in stitching in general photomanipulation software.
In-camera stitching of panoramas
Some
digital camera
A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...
s especially smartphone cameras can do the stitching internally, sometimes in real time, either as a standard feature or by installing a
smartphone
A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...
app.
Catadioptric cameras
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 mirror shape and lens used are specifically chosen and arranged so that the camera maintains a single viewpoint. The single viewpoint means the complete panorama is effectively imaged or viewed from a single point in space. One can simply warp the acquired image into a cylindrical or spherical panorama. Even perspective views of smaller fields of view can be accurately computed.
The biggest advantage of catadioptric systems (panoramic mirror lenses) is that because one uses mirrors to bend the light rays instead of lenses (like fish eye), the image has almost no chromatic aberrations or distortions. 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. Such software is normally supplied by the company who produces the system. Because the complete panorama is imaged at once, dynamic scenes can be captured without problems. Panoramic video can be captured and has found applications in robotics and journalism. The mirror lens system uses only a partial section of the digital camera's sensor and therefore some pixels are not used. Recommendations are always to use a camera with a high pixel count in order to maximize the resolution of the final image.
There are even inexpensive add-on catadioptric lenses for
smartphone
A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...
s, such as the
GoPano micro and
Kogeto Dot.
Vertorama
A vertical panorama or vertorama is a panorama with an upright orientation instead of a horizontal. It is created using the same techniques as when making a horizontal panorama.
Artistic uses
Strip panoramas
Ed Ruscha's ''Every Building on the Sunset Strip'' (1966) was made by photographing building facades contiguously as seen from the back of a pickup truck traveling a 4 km length of the street. In the ironically '
deadpan' spirit of his work at the time, he published the work in strip form in a foldout book, intended to be viewed from one end or the other to see either side of 'The Strip' in correct orientation.
Preceding Ruscha's work, in 1954, Yoshikazu Suzuki produced an accordion-fold panorama of every building on Ginza Street, Tokyo in the Japanese architecture book ''Ginza, Kawaii, Ginza Haccho''.
Joiners

Joiners (for which the terms ''panography'' and ''panograph'' have been used) is a
photographic technique in which one
picture is assembled from several overlapping photographs. This can be done manually with prints or by using
digital image editing software and may resemble a
wide-angle or
panoramic view of a scene, similar in effect to
segmented panoramic photography or
image stitching. A joiner is distinct because the overlapping edges between adjacent pictures are not removed; the edge becomes part of the picture. 'Joiners' or 'panography' is thus a type of
photomontage and a sub-set of
collage.
Artist
David Hockney is an early and important contributor to this technique. 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. He called the resulting cut-and-paste montages "joiners", and one of his most famous is "Pearblossom Highway", held by the
Getty Museum. His group was called the "Hockney joiners", and he still paints and photographs joiners today.
Jan Dibbets' ''Dutch Mountain'' series (c.1971) relies on stitching of panoramic sequences to make a mountain of the Netherlands seaside.
Revivalists
In the 1970s and 1980s, a school of art photographers took up panoramic photography, inventing new cameras and using found and updated antique cameras to revive the format. The new panoramists included
Kenneth Snelson,
David Avison, Art Sinsabaugh, and Jim Alinder.
Digital stitching
Andreas Gursky frequently employs digital stitching in his large-format panoramic imagery.
[For example: Andreas Gursky, ''Library'' 1999. Chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic. Image: ; Sheet: . Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, photographed in Stockholm's public bibliotek]
See also
*
Anamorphic format
Anamorphic format is a cinematography technique that captures widescreen images using recording media with narrower native Aspect ratio (image), aspect ratios. Originally developed for 35 mm movie film, 35 mm film to create widescreen pres ...
*
Cinerama
*
Hemispherical photography
*
Panorama portraits
*
Panoramic tripod head
*
Photo finish
*
Photo stitching software
*
Route panorama, a type of "parallel motion" or "linear" or "multi-viewpoint" panorama
*
Slit-scan photography
*
VR photography
References
Further reading
*
External links
Panoramic photography collectionat the
Smithsonian National Museum of American History ''(Photographic History collection)''
A timeline of panoramic cameras 1843–1994* Stanford University CS 17
explaining the construction of cylindrical panoramas.
with intricate technical details and optical specifications for constructing a
swing-lens panoramic camera.
A home-made panoramic head bracket for taking panoramic photographs.IVRPA- The International VR Photography Association
{{photography subject
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