The history of panoramic photography is long and full of ingenuity, both in terms of techniques for achieving a wide view, and some very interesting applications of the techniques.

Simple multiple exposures from a rotated camera are the most basic and oldest technique for a panoramic views. These were rarely seen as continuous, but rather simply what they were, individual views looking around. Of course, they were most likely displayed next to each other to create the wide view, even if broken by the edge of the frame and some overlap.

The desire to build a camera that made extremely wide views was clearly in place by the late 19th century. Various implementations of large format panoramic cameras were constructed, some with curved glass plates and special hand cranked moving lenses, rotating cameras with synchronized moving film and very wide format, wide lens combinations. The most famous of which was the geared Cirkut camera, circa 1906. Over 75 different pano camera designs are on record, dating back to 1844.

As early photographers often used very large format cameras, another technique was simply to use only a long rectangular portion of the more square format with a slightly wide angle lens, making for the illusion of a very wide view. Cameras were even constructed for this purpose with very long aspect ratios, such as the 12x20 inch Banquet camera introduced in 1914.

A few decades into the 20th century brought both medium format and 35mm versions of the rotating synced film advance design. This approach became a standard for panoramic work, although the wide-angle lenses coupled with long format frame has stayed with us, such as the Fuji 6x17.

Rotating Lenses and Moving film

• Cirkut 1906
• Hulcherama  1981
• Globuscope  1982
• Roundshot  1990

Fixed Lens Wide-Angle

• #4 Kodak Panoram 1900
• Veriwide 1961
• Fuji G617, 1983
• Widelux  1988

(http://www.panoramicphoto.com/timeline.htm)

Quicktime VR

Apple Computer stepped into the panoramic photography world in 1995 with its QuickTime VR (virtual reality) software that included a multiple exposure stitcher and viewing architecture within its QuickTime movie software. Its electronic interactive viewing of 360° spaces quickly spurred a resurgence of interest in panoramic photography.

I was hired by Apple in the spring of 1995 to work with them on the development of QTVR as it came to be known. My first field tests were in the southwest, and were done with film, as that was the technique they were premièring, multiple film exposures and scans, assembled together into 360° panoramic files.

By that time, I had already abandoned film, and so it was quite strange to suddenly be shooting again with a film camera for this advanced test of digital technology. I soon replaced the film with my Kodak DCS460 and moved on to my own work.

As it turned out, 1995 became an even more interesting year with the advent of the Betterlight scanning camera's panoramic adaptor.

Digital Panoramics

In 1995, I sent out a New Year’s card to a bunch of friends in which I told people about this scanning camera by Michael Collette I was working with. One of the people that answered was my old friend Howard Barney, who had built the BarneyScan (the first desktop 35mm film scanner ) and originally licensed Photoshop from John and Thomas Knoll. Howard had sold BarneyScan, by then had opened a machine shop in Portland and just played with projects he wanted to do. Howard called me up to say that he knew Michael Collette from his work with Dunn Imaging and also that he had a design for a panoramic head for a scanning camera.

Howard and Mike got back in touch. Howard designed and hand-built a panoramic head for the 4x5. Basically, it was a rotating stage that could be computer controlled. His rotating stage was mounted on the tripod, the camera mounted on top of that, and the software controlled to the motor, instructing it how to turn. The BetterLight sensor is put dead-on center of the lens instead of traveling across the back of the imaging area of the camera, a sweet place to work from. Then the whole camera turns. In fact you get better quality if you make every photograph with the panoramic head because the sensor is dead-on center of the optic, and so there is no distortion, no chromatic aberration, no nothing other than the best image that optic can produce.

In November of 1995 we made the first digital panoramic photograph with Michael’s camera. There had been digital panoramic photos before; the Viking Lander that went to Mars in 1976 had a 12-sensor photodiode camera and panoramic capability. As far as we have been able to discover, there has never been a 360-degree digital camera until this. The BetterLight is actually capable of a 400-degree rotation. You will notice the same tree at both ends of the Ft. Point/Golden Gate Panorama. My approach for shooting panoramas with this technology has been generally to shoot about 370 degrees, creating a 10-degree overlap.

Big Prints and Panoramic Displays

Eventually, Hewlett Packard got involved and through the courtesy of Michael Stokes, who made us some big prints on their DesignJet printers. We had these rather long prints, where the Golden Gate Bridge looked really strange. It looms toward you and looms away, exactly the way it looked to the lens in this strange way of looking at the world. Back at the Digital Pond, my good friend Pete Hogg decided to host a little experiment where we took one of the prints, and glued its top edge to the outside of a huge round cardboard cutout, with the print facing inward. It was then hung by rope from their ceiling. When I stepped inside, it was like a photographic transport to another place, the most immersive photographic experience I had ever seen. My use of the term “immersive” was later picked up to refer to VR panoramic technology.

I wanted to replicate this experience. Hewlett Packard built a temporary display for their headquarters in Palo Alto. Apple commissioned a portable version in 1998, designed and built by my friend Robin Myers, who later constructed a 360-degree room for my gallery in Pacifica. These walk-in panoramic rooms allow viewers to be surrounded by the Grand Canyon or whatever print we manage to hang. The big prints do continue to amaze.

In many ways, I’ve been making photographs on the faith that I would someday be able to open the files. The very high resolution 1-gigabyte panoramics could not even be opened in Photoshop when we started to make them in 1995. On my second panoramic outing in late 1995, I stumbled onto a width limit in Photoshop; it wouldn’t open an image beyond 30,000 pixels. The new panoramics were up to 65,000 pixels long. I kept making them anyway, knowing that eventually this problem would be solved. I couldn’t resist these very detailed records of a scene. Of course, I also made lower-res, easier to deal with versions when I could. In 2003, this limit was overcome in Photoshop and I can now open these files and make good use of them in my software of choice.

Multi-Exposure Panoramics Techniques

Panoramic photography has been greatly enabled by the capability to build panoramic views from a sequence of exposures. This is done with a series of photographs made while rotating the camera between frames. These individual frames are then joined together in a (hopefully) seamless collage through a process called stitching. There are several software packages that are designed to composite these images together, including Apple’s original QuickTime VR Authoring Tools and Photoshop’s built-in panoramic stitcher, Photomerge.

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