Panoramic photography

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, 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 "

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 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.

A panorama of Sydney featuring (from left) the Sydney Opera House, the central business district skyline, and the Sydney Harbour Bridge

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

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.[8]

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

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. 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.[12]

. It is believed that the panorama initially had eleven plates, but the original daguerreotypes no longer exist.

After the advent of

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.[14]

Following the invention of

brand names indicative of their era; such as the Pantascopic, (1862)[15] Cylindrograph survey camera (1884),[16] Kodak Panoram (1899),[17][18] Wonder Panoramic (1890),[19][page needed] and Cyclo-Pan (1970).[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. Tilbrook (1884-1937),[22] and Harry Phillips (1873-1944).[23]

View from the top of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, Albumen prints, February, 1864, by George N. Barnard
Lavender Bay, 1875, by Bernard Otto Holtermann and Charles Bayliss
Center City Philadelphia panorama, from 1913.

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.[24]

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.[24]

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.[24]

Short rotation

A 1900 advertisement for a short rotation panoramic camera

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.[25] 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. 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.

A negative from a 35 mm swing lens camera

Short rotation cameras usually offer few shutter speeds 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 10 meters (33 feet). 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.

The distortion of architectural subjects is severe when using a rotating lens camera

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.[citation needed] Similar distortion is seen in panoramas shot with digital cameras using in-camera stitching.

Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive made with a Sony Cyber-shot, showing faults (discontinuities) caused by objects in fast motion during image capture. The panorama is stitched
from multiple exposures taken while the camera is manually rotated.

Full rotation

360-degree panoramic projection of the VLT survey telescope[26]

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.[citation needed]

Digital

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

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.[citation needed
]

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.[27]

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 lenses exhibit extreme geometrical distortion but typically display less brightness falloff than rectilinear lenses.[citation needed]

Examples of this type of camera are: Taiyokoki Viscawide-16 ST-D (

Medium format (film)
).

The

catadioptric lenses.[citation needed
]

Digital photography

Digital stitching of segmented panoramas

PTgui
.

With digital photography, the most common method for producing panoramas is to take a series of pictures and stitch them together.[30] There are two main types: the cylindrical panorama used primarily in stills photography and the spherical panorama used for virtual-reality images.[31]

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.[25][32][33] 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.

Giza Pyramids in Cairo, Egypt
The Willamette River as it passes through western Portland, Oregon, with Mount St. Helens, Mount Adams and Mount Hood in the background

In-camera stitching of panoramas

Some digital cameras especially smartphone cameras can do the stitching internally, sometimes in real time, either as a standard feature or by installing a smartphone app.

A 270-degree panorama stitched "in-camera". Many modern digital cameras can automatically stitch a sequence of images shot while the camera is panned (moved horizonally).
A panning smartphone camera captures moving vehicles with stitching anomalies.

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.[citation needed] 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 smartphones, such as the GoPano micro and Kogeto Dot.

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.[34]

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.[35]

Joiners

Panograph of Hyde Park in Sydney by Night
Panograph of Hyde Park in Sydney by Night

Joiners (for which the terms panography and panograph have been used)

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

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.[39]

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.[40]

Digital stitching

Andreas Gursky frequently employs digital stitching in his large-format panoramic imagery.[41]

See also

References

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  10. ^ Gernsheim, Helmut (1962). Creative photography : aesthetic trends, 1839-1960. Bonanza Books. pp. 30, 7n. Retrieved 2 February 2016.
  11. ^ "Panoramic Photography". www.douban.com. douban.com. Retrieved 15 December 2014.
  12. ^ Niven, Peter (1983). "Hand-List of the Jevons Archives in the John Rylands Library of Manchester" (PDF). John Rylands University Library. Retrieved 13 February 2021.
  13. ^ "Holtermann panorama" (PDF). National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved 18 January 2010.
  14. ^ Image Volume 32, Issue 1 - Page 33
  15. ^ Sir Humphry Davy; Davy, John, 1790-1868, ed (1972). The collected works of Sir Humphry Davy. New York Johnson Reprint Corp. p. 724. Retrieved 2 February 2016. {{cite book}}: |author2= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  16. OCLC 190846013.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
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    )
  21. ^ See Maria Zagala’s entry on R. T. Maurice in A Century of Progress: South Australian Photography, 1840s–1940s, Exhibition catalogue (Adelaide Art Gallery of South Australia, 2007), 135
  22. ^ See Phillip Kay, The Far-Famed Blue Mountains of Harry Phillips (Leura, NSW, Second Back Row Press, 1985).
  23. ^ .
  24. ^ a b Littlefield, Rik (6 February 2006). "Theory of the 'No-Parallax' Point in Panorama Photography" (PDF). ver. 1.0. Retrieved 14 January 2007. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  25. ^ "Very Large Telescope Ready for Action". ESO Picture of the Week. European Southern Observatory. Retrieved 25 July 2011.
  26. ^ Eric Renner (2008). Pinhole photography from historic technique to digital application (4th ed). Amsterdam Focal Press pps. 129-140
  27. ^ "Taiyokoki Viscawide-16 ST-D". The Sub Club. Retrieved 17 March 2020.
  28. ^ "Pannaroma 1x3 Prototype". Siciliano Camera Works. Archived from the original on 13 March 2015. Retrieved 16 October 2018.
  29. ^ Speight, David (11 February 2020). "How to Photograph Panoramas". Nature TTL. Retrieved 17 February 2020.
  30. .
  31. ^ Kerr, Douglas A. (2005). "The Proper Pivot Point for Panoramic Photography" (PDF). The Pumpkin. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 April 2008. Retrieved 14 January 2007.
  32. ^ van Walree, Paul. "Misconceptions in photographic optics". Archived from the original on 22 January 2009. Retrieved 14 January 2007. Item #6.
  33. ^ Ruscha, Edward (1966). Every building on the sunset strip. Los Angeles, California. Retrieved 3 February 2016.
  34. ^ Company, David (2012) 'Precedented Photography'. In Aperture, vol.206, 86.
  35. ^ "Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2".
  36. ^ "Kenneth Snelson".
  37. ^ For example: Andreas Gursky, Library 1999. Chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic. Image: 62+916 by 127 inches (158.9 cm × 322.6 cm); Sheet: 78+78 by 142+18 inches (200 cm × 361 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, photographed in Stockholm's public bibliotek

Further reading

  • Johnson, R. Barry (2008). Mouroulis, Pantazis Z; Smith, Warren J; Johnson, R. Barry (eds.). "Correctly making panoramic imagery and the meaning of optical center". SPIE Proc. Current Developments in Lens Design and Optical Engineering IX. 7060: 70600F.1–70600F.8.
    S2CID 122325198
    .

External links