Before you leap to your feet and wave a flag, this is not about that sort of emotion. Nor is it the last night of the Proms.*
This is about panoramas. Those wide pictures that spread out over coffee tables, railway stations, and lounge room walls. The ones that are wider than they are tall - and by a considerable margin. The boundaries of what is considered a panoramic shot seem to vary with different authors or equipment companies, but I just take them to be anything I have to turn my head to view. Bear in mind I wear spectacles and they tunnel my vision somewhat - you may be able to see in a more panoramic fashion just when you gaze on the landscape unaided.
Panoramas used to be hard work - you can see examples of them taken in the wet plate era - or even earlier - and made up of multiple shots stacked side by side. There may be differences of tone, of texture, of exposure between panels, and the distortions of the lenses may be compensated for or left alone. The best of the early panos give a real sense of the world at the time - we are grateful to the photographic artists for them.
Later film work could use very wide strips of emulsion and either wide lenses or shutters that wiped the image along the film while the subjects sat still. This could give a more even appearance but sometimes a subject would run from one end of the exposure to the other while the shutter panned - and appear twice.
Big pano work needed big formats and big cameras - with the possible exception of the Widelux or Hasselblad X-pan machines. They got it done on 35mm film. And now in the digital age you can all get it done on the camera you own - because nearly all of them have some form of panoramic setting buried deep in the menu.
All my Fujifilms do - I just set an appropriate command in the drive settings and then present the camera to the scene. It asks me to swing through either 120º or 180º at a steady pace and records what it sees as a continuous jpeg strip.
I need to be a reasonable distance from the subject to allow for focusing depth of field and I need to swing around on a flat keel - a tripod with a pan head makes this easy. The camera can be fooled by the scene into giving a poor exposure if it is pointed ar an exceptional area to start with...so I average out my exposure and set it manually and it all looks good.
The thing that is hardest is to find suitably picturesque landscapes or crowds to record. Not every subject looks good long and wide. This water pano is some sort of developer's drainage lake down in Maylands and while it seems to promise a great deal, so far it isn't delivering it. Perhaps they need a toy boat regatta, more foliage, or submarines.
Mind you, a pano need not be all trees and mountains. There are urban ones everywhere. If you are retired you can go out and find them when everyone else has to be at work...
The next problem to be overcome is how to get a standard inkjet printer to turn out a long strip of image - There must be a way. In the meantime, the good commercial labs do this sort of thing with their printers all the time, so if you get a gem of an image yourself consider having them do one for you on metal or acrylic.
* For the younger members of the readership, if there are any, google the lyrics to this favourite British imperial song. Then you'll get it.
