Panoramics

08/01/12

I have just added a gallery of panoramas to the site. They are notoriously difficult to display to their full advantage on a website, but they can be dramatic and arresting images.

There are various ways to produce panoramas today: there are cameras which crop images in camera to a panoramic (letter-box) format, there is software available to 'stitch' together a series of digital images, and there are several dedicated cameras which produce genuine panoramic images on film.

My own preference is to use a swing-lens panoramic camera, shooting on to colour print or reversal film, and then digitising the negatives with a scanner. This produces a single genuine panoramic image, giving an extraordinarily wide field of view.

Some cameras achieve a panoramic negative by employing a wide-angle lens shooting on to a wide letter-box film format, either in 35mm or medium format. This can produce blurring at the edges of the frame and can cause verticals in the image to converge. The swing-lens cameras employ a different method: with this type of camera the lens actually rotates in a turret within the camera, and the film is held in a curved plane aligned with the movement of the lens. This allows the lens to sweep the film frame, but the curvature of the film keeps it the same distance from the lens at all times, preventing distortion and focus fall-off. The result is a stunning image, perfectly in focus to the very edges of the frame, with none of the inherent distortion one gets with using extreme wide-angle lenses on regular cameras. Another spin-off benefit is that only the 'sweet-spot' towards the centre of the lens' field of view (where a lens' resolution is optimal) is ever used, so it is possible to achieve stunning resolution.

If all this sounds a bit technical, all potential image buyers need to know is that these images are DIFFERENT! Immediately and obviously different! They can be used to great power in commercial and advertising situations, and are well worth considering if you are looking for an image to show-off your business or product and want it to 'stand out in the crowd'!