What is panoramic photography?

Pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy refers to the art of cap­tur­ing and cre­at­ing pan­or­a­mas. A pan­or­amic im­age is typ­ic­ally char­ac­ter­ised by a large width to height ra­tio. This can either be achieved by crop­ping a “nor­mal” im­age, by us­ing a pan­or­amic cam­era which “scans” a sig­ni­fic­antly lar­ger ho­ri­zont­al field of view than a tra­di­tion­al cam­era, or by “stitch­ing” sev­er­al ad­ja­cent pic­tures to­geth­er in­to a single, wide view.

Thanks to ma­jor ad­vances in di­git­al pho­to­graphy and soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, pan­or­amic pho­to­graph­ers now have ac­cess to un­pre­ced­en­ted pos­sib­il­it­ies and in­cred­ible im­age qual­ity. They can cap­ture as wide a field of view as they like, all the way to 360° ho­ri­zont­ally and 180° ver­tic­ally! This means that from a giv­en point in space every pos­sible angle and view is covered.

Ad­vant­ages over tra­di­tion­al pho­to­graphy

A pan­or­amic im­age can either be viewed like a tra­di­tion­al pho­to­graph (al­beit with some amount of per­ceived “dis­tor­tion” around the top- and bot­tom edge), but it is a much more im­mers­ive and ex­cit­ing ex­per­i­ence to watch the im­age with an in­ter­act­ive view­er, giv­ing the ob­serv­er full con­trol over which part and per­spect­ive of the im­age he wants to see.

That way, he has con­fid­ence that noth­ing has been hid­den from his view. The pan­or­amic view­er gives a much stronger feel­ing of pres­ence than a tra­di­tion­al photo.

In­ter­activ­ity

To in­ter­act with a pan­or­amic view­er, click and drag your mouse in the view­er win­dow. You can use the [Shift] keys to zoom in, and [Ctrl] to zoom out.

Try it out in any of the pan­or­a­mas here!

Fur­ther pos­sib­il­it­ies

The in­ter­activ­ity of pan­or­amic im­ages on the com­puter does not end there. Sev­er­al pan­or­a­mas can eas­ily be joined to­geth­er to form a “vir­tu­al tour”. For in­stance, you can look around in one room, then click on the (spe­cially high­lighted) door­way to move on to the next room, or click on a win­dow to see an out­side view of the place. This gives the view­er the il­lu­sion of walk­ing around the place at their own leis­ure.

But why not try it out for your­self!

Vir­tu­al tours are an ideal pro­mo­tion­al tool for ho­tels, spas, re­cre­ation cen­ters, parks etc. as they al­low po­ten­tial vis­it­ors to have a look around the place be­fore they book, giv­ing them con­fid­ence and as­sur­ance of the qual­ity of the es­tab­lish­ment. See for in­stance this in­ter­est­ing art­icle how vir­tu­al tours can help in­crease your busi­ness.

A note for iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad users

The pan­or­a­mas shown on this web­site are dis­played us­ing an Adobe Flash® based view­er. As Apple re­fuses to al­low this tech­no­logy on its mo­bile devices, an al­tern­at­ive way of ren­der­ing the pan­or­a­mas had to be found.

If you're vis­it­ing this web­site on these devices, you will auto­mat­ic­ally be presen­ted with a spe­cial ver­sion of this web­site that is op­ti­mized for smal­ler screens, and where the pano­rama view­er does not rely on Adobe Flash® tech­no­lo­gy.

An al­tern­at­ive way of en­joy­ing the pan­or­a­mas from this web­site is to in­stall the free app PangeaVR and then nav­ig­ate in the port­fo­lio list to the en­try for “pano.ie”.