- Meers, Nick.
Stretch: The World of Panoramic Photography.
Mies, Switzerland: RotoVision, 2003.
ISBN 2-88046-692-X.
-
In the early years of the twentieth century, panoramic photography was
all the rage. Itinerant photographers with unwieldy gear such as
the Cirkut camera
would visit towns to photograph and sell 360° panoramas of the
landscape and wide format pictures of large groups of people, such as
students at the school or workers at a factory or mine.
George
Lawrence's
panoramas
(some taken from a camera carried aloft by
a kite) of the devastation resulting from the
1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire have become archetypal
images of that disaster.
Although pursued as an art form by a small band of photographers, and
still used occasionally for large group portraits, the panoramic fad
largely died out with the popularity of fixed-format roll film cameras
and the emergence of the ubiquitous 24×36 mm format. The
advent of digital cameras and desktop image processing software able
to
“stitch”
multiple images more or less seamlessly (if
you
know
what you're doing when
you take them) into an arbitrarily wide panorama has sparked a
renaissance in the format, including special-purpose film and
digital cameras for panoramic photography. Computers with
high performance graphics hardware now permit viewing full-sphere
virtual reality imagery in which the viewer can “look around”
at will, something undreamed of in the first golden age of
panoramas.
This book provides an introduction to the history, technology, and art
of panoramic photography, alternating descriptions of
equipment and technique with galleries featuring the work of
contemporary masters of the format, including many examples
of non-traditional subjects for panoramic presentation which will
give you ideas for your own experiments. The book, which is
beautifully printed in China, is itself in “panoramic
format” with pages 30 cm wide by 8 cm tall for an aspect
ratio of 3¾:1, allowing many panoramic pictures to be
printed on a single page. (There are a surprising number of
vertical panoramas in the examples which are short-changed by
the page format, as they are always printed vertically
rather than asking you to turn the book around to view them.)
Although the quality of reproduction is superb, the typography
is frankly irritating, at least to my ageing eyes. The body copy
is set in a light sans-serif font with capitals about six points
tall, and photo captions in even smaller type: four point capitals.
If that wasn't bad enough, all of the sections on technique are
printed in white type on a black background which, especially given
the high reflectivity of the glossy paper, is even more difficult
to read. This appears to be entirely for artistic effect—
there is plenty of white (or black) space which would have permitted
using a more readable font. The cover price of US$30 seems high
for a work of fewer than 150 pages, however wide and handsome.
November 2006 