The wider the better
John Wade looks at the world of panoramic photography, from the days when film cameras were made for truly expansive images
PANORAMIC cameras are nearly as old as photography itself. The Megaskop, which is usually accepted as the first model, was made in 1844 to produce super-wide daguerreotypes on silver-plated copper. The theme continued through the wet-plate era, with cameras such as the Sutton Panoramic, when glass plates had to be made just prior to exposure, used wet and developed immediately after. But the craze really took off with the advent of rollfilm in 1888.
With the dawn of the 20th century, rollfilm panoramic cameras were divided into two distinct types: swing-lens cameras, such as the Kodak Panoram and Al-Vista; and rotating cameras such as the Kodak Cirkut. There was a resurgence of interest in the 1950s and ’60s with a new rage of 35mm panoramic models, and those are the cameras most easily found second-hand today, plus a couple of contemporary models that can still be bought new.
In a swing-lens camera, the film is loaded around a curve and the lens is fixed at one end of a short tube with a slit at the other end. With the camera pointing forward, the lens points to one side. During exposure, the lens swings in an arc, building up its image on the film as it swings. Swinglens cameras such as the Horizon are still available new today for use with 35mm film. Cameras such as the more rare Noblex 6/150 shoot super-wide images on 120 rollfilm.
A rotating camera incorporates a motor that revolves the camera while the film is driven from one spool to another, past a slit at the focal plane. Such cameras are capable of shooting a complete 360° image, but are more traditionally used to rotate through only 180°. If you remember having your photograph taken at school with one of those cameras that scanned hundreds of children arranged in a huge semi- circle, it is likely that you have seen a Kodak Cirkut rotating camera in action.
In the last days of film, there was a craze for inexpensive 35mm panoramic cameras that were simply 35mm compacts in which the film plane had been masked top and bottom to create a panoramic effect.