Panoramic Photography Most images on the Web are static, they just sit there like a picture hung on a digital wall. However, there are other photographs that you can pan and rotate. These images are products of immersive imaging techniques. There are two basic types; panoramas and objects. Most photographs, even those taken with a wide-angle lens, show just a sliver of the overall scene. To take in the entire scene you have to spin around in a 360-degree circle, looking from a single point in space out to a surrounding environment. There are some cameras that will do just that. Others just take in slices that are wider than normal lenses without capturing the entire 360-degrees. Both types of cameras are expensive and there are now much less expensive digital ways to combine a series of photos into a seamless panorama. Early Panoramic Photographs The first panoramas, taken in the 1840s, were made by taking a series of daguerreotype images that could then be framed or hung side-by-side. The same approach was later used with tintypes and paper prints. An early panorama of Chicago before the fire.   An old Cirkut camera on its special tripod. By the late twentieth century, motorized cameras were being made specifically for panoramic photography. In one type, the lens swung while the film remained stationary. In another type, the camera rotated on a special tripod to "paint" the image on a moving sheet of film. One of the most famous of such cameras, the Kodak Cirkut camera was patented in 1904. It used large format film, ranging in width from 5" to 16" could produce 360-degree photographs measuring up to 20 feet long. These cameras were frequently used to photograph groups, especially school classes. If you look closely at some of these photos, you'll see the same person appear twice, usually at the far left and far right ends of the picture. As the camera swings by the left end of the scene, someone can run quickly to the other end and freeze. They'll appear in both places. In the business, this is called a "pizza run."   Long Beach, California, Bathing Beauty Parade, 1927. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.   Remote Realities OneShot360 works with a number of digital cameras. One-Shot Panoramic Camera One-shot cameras use mirrors to capture 360 degree images in one frame. Software is then used to "flatten" the captured donut-shaped image into a familiar panorama. Remote Realities' OneShot360 incorporates a parabolic mirror, relay lens, and software. The OneShot360 Viewer software lets you mark, crop and preview digital OneShot360 pictures before you save and publish them to the Internet, CD-ROM, or DVD. Two-Shot Panoramic Camera IPIX images are amazing sphere-like images that include every horizontal and vertical aspect of a scene. To create the images, you take two back-to-back photographs using an 8mm lens and a special IPIX tripod mount—called an IPIX rotator. You then use IPIX software to stitch the two images into a seamless 360-degree sphere. In addition to viewing these images with a browser and the IPIX plug-in, you can also use a separate viewer. Individual, but overlapping pictures are captured around a point of rotation. Panoramas with Regular Digital Cameras Although panoramic photographs have been taken in sections and pasted together for years, it was the development of computer software that made seem-less panoramas possible with a regular camera. To create a seamless panorama with a regular film or digital camera, you begin by capturing a series of images around a single point of rotation, the optical center of the lens. Later, you stitch these views together with software. Hardware and Techniques There are a few important ingredients in getting good panoramic images. You can use almost any kind of camera but you may have to be careful with the choice of lens. Wide angle lenses require fewer pictures to cover the same view but make things appear smaller and more distant. Rectilinear lens—those that make straight lines in the scene appear as straight lines in the image are required by may stitching programs. Most lenses are rectilinear, but "fish eye" type lenses aren't. The camera must be absolutely level as you rotate it. The images must be taken at specific increments and overlap by just the right amount; 25% on each side. Camera setup with two tripod heads. Leveling the Camera The camera must be as level as possible as you rotate it in a circle so the photographs will line up when they are later stitched together. Some tripods have twin-axis bubble levels to guide you, but you can also use a small handheld level. Orientation The camera's orientation depends on the scene that you are capturing. For most scenes the camera is mounted horizontally in landscape mode. This is easier to do and also requires fewer images to cover a scene. However, some scenes have vertical elements that require you to mount the camera vertically in portrait mode. This mode also gives you more ability to pan the image if you convert it to QuickTime VR or similar format. Landscape Portrait Orientation   To shoot with the camera in a vertical position, you'll need a bracket that keeps the axis of rotation centered on the optical center of the lens as you rotate it. These brackets hold the camera vertically and allow you to side it sideways to position the lens over the center of the tripod. The Peace River 3Sixty is an indexing panoramic mount compatible with most standard 35 mm SLR film and digital still cameras using a rectilinear wide angle lens for overlapping coverage of 360 degree scenes. It allows you to shift between increments of 12 & 18 and allows the camera to rotate more easily in one direction than the other to reduce the possibility of shooting images out of sequence.   The Kaidan Landscape Bracket (QPLB-1) uses detent discs with click-stops to let you easily rotate the camera the correct increments. Incrementing the Images When you take a series of images, you nave to be sure they cover the entire 360-degrees and overlap by 50%. You can guess-timate this but it helps to have a tripod head designed for the task. Some come with degree marks to guide you, but better ones come with detents so the camera snaps into place at the exact position. A wide angle lens will let you see a larger vertical field of view; however, it also gives the impression of "pushing" objects in the view farther away. The number of images you have to take depends on the focal length and angle of view of your lens.   It also depends on the camera's orientation since you'll need more if the camera is mounted vertically. Exposure The software you use to stitch images together can even out the lighting in a scene but it helps if you give it good images to work with. To do so, take the camera off autoexposure and use the same exposure for all images in the series. Try to avoid extremes in lighting. These occur on bright sunny days when there are bright highlights and dark shadows. The problem is compounded because you have to shoot into the sun. If you can pick your time, pick a day when it's cloudy bright—overcast but with slight shadows on the ground. If the sun is out, shoot at mid-day to keep the lighting even. If you have to shoot at other times, position the camera so direct sunlight is blocked behind a tree or building when photographing in its direction. When shooting indoor panoramas, set up the camera to avoid shots of windows with direct sun shining through. In addition to horizonal panoramas, you can also create verticals. Here the sequence of five images on the left was stitched into the seamless panorama on the right.