There are several types of panoramic photography. An early type was the large-format landscapes and cityscapes photographed by, for example, Martin Behrman (San Francisco, 1851) and George Barnard (CivilWar). These consisted of assemblages of two or more exposures made, each on its own film, as a conventional camera was rotated. Special panoramic cameras came into use in the late nineteenth century. The lens might rotate across stationary film, or both camera and film rotated horizontally up to 360 degrees. The exposures were then developed, printed, and assembled, with attempts to make the seams between frames less evident.
It would have been possible to improve the visual effect somewhat by curving the panorama and placing the viewed at its center of curvature, though the individual frames still retained their original flat geometry. No doubt there were efforts to wrap the multi-frame panoramas into a 360-degree shape, although it would have remained cylindrical and thus lack vertical visual curvature. Then an actual viewer might have been placed in the center of a much enlarged picture, or else an arrangement of lenses might have made it possible for an external viewer to observe the unenlarged and thus sharper panorama from the center.
Such arrangements, limited as they were by the photographic medium of the time, did not fill the need for the panoramic experience. But panoramic paintings, some of very large dimensions, had existed since 1787. They could accommodate direct viewing from their centers, and they had the further advantages of color and of artistic license to amplify the optical effect and add a narrative elements. They seem to have had their heyday before the time of color photography, though some have been created since. A notable American example is the Atlanta Cyclorama.
The marriage of photography and the computer changed panoramic photography greatly. Graphics software made it far easier to edit images, whether they were scanned from conventional film pictures or captured with digital cameras. Other software made it possible to combine flat images, however acquired, and to match precisely their overlapping areas to create a seamless image that represented up to 360 degrees of rotation, both horizontally and also, depending on the technology available, vertically – with appropriate adjustment to emulate the sphere of vision available to the human eye as the head turns along various axes.
Going beyond the print medium, the computer-based digital panoramic medium could then present the panorama on-screen for interactive exploration by viewers whose virtual location was at the the point where the original camera had captured the constituent images of the panorama. Further software enhancements made it possible to add links to other resources, whether AV files, websites, text information, or even other panoramas linked into a tour.
A landmark in digital-based panoramic photography was Apple’s
••inverse: object panos; Vermeer