Panoramic View

 

After my first confrontation with panoramic photography in the form of a 1962-made FT-2 I almost stopped shooting regular shaped photos. With the advent of easy to use stitching software panoramic photography is getting more popular. However, all images shown here are made on film using real panoramic cameras. The main difference in using a camera that produces an image with the final dimension in one shot is that it allows for some sort of documentary style reportage photography. With some of the cameras one additional thing makes taking documentary style pictures even easier: they simply don't look like cameras, so most people are not aware of being photographed.
  

Equipment

The photos being shown here have been shot with 4 different cameras. One is the Russian Krasnogorsk ФТ-2 (FT-2) swing lens producing a 24x110mm image (120° horizontal field of view) on 35mm film. Another camera with the same negative size but in a non-rotational version is my home-built Nipan (two fused Nikkormat EL bodies with a 65mm Super Angulon and 80° horizontal field of view, 20° vertical).
The less elongated formats are shot with a Cyclops WideEye (6x17 format, 110° horizontal field of view) whis is a swing lens camera. The same aspect ratio but on 35mm film and using a flat back is provided by my F2-72.
Photos of various aspect ratios are made with a home-built 360° rotational camera (50mm lens on 120 roll-film resulting in 320mm long negatives for a full rotation).

I make black & white enlargements of 35mm film negatives on a Beseler 45MXT enlarger with the negative carriers milled out to fit the panoramic negative formats. The light head is a home-made multigrade LED head.
 

Links

• Krasnogorsk ФТ-2 camera overview (Russian)
• Jaroslav Poncar - lots of photos taken with FT-2
• Edition Panorama - editing house specialized on panorama format
• FT-2 photos by Detlef Hansen
• “Straße der Gartenkunst”
• FT-2 photos by Sascha Loss
• Gary Alexander's Cyclops
• Graham Patterson's Cyclops website
• Somak Ray's Magnorama Blog
• The Fruitful Wound photos taken by Dennis Santella with a Pannaroma camera
• Siciliano Camera Works - cameras made by Thomas Roma (maker of the Pannaroma)
• Panorama Kameras by Manfred Graumann
• Rheinblicke - photos by Roland Goseberg shot with FT-2

 

Kontakt

You can reach me via email to olaf <a typical sign> nullmedium <full stop> de