ABSTRACT
Panoramic photography has an old history. At the beginning, photographers created a panorama by making a series of images from a regular photographic camera in which all the images were placed next to each other to create a panoramic image. Figure 9.1
shows a panoramic view of San Francisco in 1853 (Kingslake 1985). This process can be easily done today using a feature of the digital camera. The real development of panoramic photography was achieved using a curved focal plane. Many cameras used a daguerreotype (a daguerreotype is a direct positive made in the camera on a silvered copper plate) photographic rectangular plate to record wide-angle images up to 150° (horizontal field of view [FOV]). One of the first cameras to use a wide-angle lens to capture a FOV larger than the human eye was in the late 1850s. British photographer Thomas Sutton invented a unique waterfilled spherical lens to create panoramic pictures without the need to rotate the camera body. At that time, the Sutton lens was a real improvement as panoramas were very popular, offering a real impression of foreign countries, people, cities, events, and many other exotic things. The fascination with panoramic photography still remains today.
