What is panography? | See more panoramas!

What is panography?

Panography is a new term for the art of capturing and creating panoramas, but what is a panorama? Panoramas came into existence a long time before digital imaging. "Panorama", from the Greek "pan horama" - "all view" - was the term used by Scottish painter Robert Barker to describe some of his works, which were characteristically of a large width to height ratio. Once photography was established, photographers tried assembling adjacent images of one place into a single, wide view. Nowadays with the dawn of digital photography taking over the traditional, film-based practice, panoramic photographs boast unprecedented possibilities and quality, exceeding even the physical possibilities of the camera shooting them.

You can have me capture as wide a field of view as you wish, up to 360°x180°! This type of image can be viewed the same way as any other digital photograph, or using a special panorama viewing program, which will allow you to 'move around' as if you were really standing there! You can pan horizontally and vertically, and zoom in and out.

Click the panorama with your mouse and move it to rotate. To zoom in use shift, to zoom out - ctrl.

You can also have several panoramas joined together to create a virtual tour. This allows you to look around in one panorama, and then to click on a designated area, e.g. a doorway, to automatically get taken to another panorama which could present the room beyond the doorway you just clicked, giving the illusion that you walked from one place to another. This is an ideal solution for hotels, spas, recreation centers, parks and similar places!

A panorama can contain a high dynamic range. A dynamic range is the difference between the brightest and darkest point in a scene. Typical photos cannot capture this whole range, and so result in photos with either 'blown out' skies (the sky appears plain white although in real life it may have been deep blue with fluffy white clouds) or 'clipped shadows' (the shadows appear black, although in real life you could actually see things in these shadowy areas). But this is no longer a problem, since with the help of modern technology I can capture the whole dynamic range, so you will see details everywhere, from the brightest to the darkest areas!

I can offer the finished panorama in three forms

• as a flat digital photograph that you can view the same way as any other photo on your computer,
• as a virtual panorama or virtual tourwhich is ready to be embedded in your website or viewed on your computer and allows rotating and zooming, as seen above,
• or as a large format (you decide how large, it can even be several meters wide!) high quality printout. Thanks to the panorama's high resolution, your printout will be crisp even at huge dimensions!

See more panoramas!

See more 'virtual panorama' examples in the gallery.