Widescreen expansive
The sideways panorama is the most popular kind, but it requires discipline
By far the most popular direction to extend the image is sideways, and the technique of pan-and-stitch makes it extremely easy. In fact, most smartphone cameras can do it. The word ‘pan’, which comes from the motion picture industry, is a contraction of panorama and these have a near-universal appeal and an interesting history, both worth exploring. Not only the way we see, but also the physical way that landscapes and cityscapes are laid out, naturally encourage a panoramic view; one of the most basic appeals is it immerses the viewer. In painting, panoramas go back at least as far as Roman murals, while 360 degree panoramas viewed on a cylinder from inside became wildly popular in the late 18th century in Europe.
While Chinese art developed sideways-rolling scroll paintings in addition to the more usual vertical scenes. Panoramic cameras are almost as old as photography itself. Not long after the daguerrotype was invented there was a camera, the Megaskop, built to make wide daguerrotypes in 1844. The craze had a revival when roll film was invented, and yet again with digital. In other words, the very idea of a panoramic view has always been naturally appealing.
Digitally, a stitched panorama can go as wide as you like, without any technical problems. The interesting issues are all creative, and the first is that the wider you go, the less possible it is for anyone to take in the entire image in one glance. That indeed is the point, to create a different viewing experience, and this in turn means making sure that the image is big enough.
There are two ways of doing this: either print large for a gallery display and allow viewers to walk past, or scroll along the panorama on a screen by turning it into a video. That second option isn’t worth trying to reproduce on a printed page here, but if you’re interested in how it can work, there are a few examples on my Instagram account @michaelfreemanphotography. Look for a couple of videos from Mauritius posted back in December 2017, and the recent one of Chinese dim sum. Funnily enough, this is how Chinese sideways scroll-paintings are meant to be viewed, rolling and unrolling the two ends in both hands to see just a part at a time.
Back to the manageable proportions that actually do work as a composition, the limits are probably in the region of 3:1. There are no hard and fast rules. In cinema it means any aspect ratio wider than Academy (1.375:1), but in television and computer screens, the arrival of HDTV has made 16:9 the most popular. And as directors of photography know, wide is a very attractive format in which to compose. It was, after all, Hollywood that invented widescreen in the 1950s specifically to fight back against television, with Cinerama at almost 3:1 and Cinemascope at 2.35:1
There are some obvious naturals for going wide, like a cityscape across a river, and many landscapes. But as this series is about creativity why not imagine how a less likely scene might look if treated as a panorama? Especially something without a horizon line, which most people would
The discipline in photographing panoramas is in imagining how the final frame will look
expect. Here is just such an example, taken in the Chinese city of Ninghai.
Sometimes the shapes and lines in a scene just want to take the frame wider, which is why I started by having the woman – who’s washing clothes in the river – at the far left. Dressed in red and facing right she makes a clear stop on the left, and initiates a rightward view which the curving line of the weir continues. In fact I’d envisaged the frame much as in the main picture here, there also seemed at the time no reason to stop panning to the right; the smaller image shows how that looks. This is also an example of the dilemma of knowing when and where to stop with a pan-and-stitch. The discipline in photographing panoramas is in imagining how the final frame will look but experimenting is also important even if you later reject it; as I did in this case.