Panoramic Photography is photography with the aim to create images with a very wide field of view.

Special panoramic cameras have been around for many years but with the introduction of digital cameras and panoramic software the production of panoramic images has become much easier and cheaper.

Most panoramas found on the internet today have been stitched from multiple photos taken with a DSLR camera. With increasing performance of personal computers and resolution of digital cameras, the resulting images exceed occassionally 1 Gigapixels which is generally unsuitable for use on the internet due to the large download sizes.

Basically, a panoramic image can be explained as the interior surface of a sphere with the viewer located in the centre of the sphere. To be able to store this 3D interior of the sphere into a graphics file, the image has to be projected onto a 2D surface.

There is a number of projections available for panoramic images. The projections used for the images here are mainly equirectangular, also known as spherical, i.e. the surface of a sphere is mapped on to a rectangle with a width to height ratio of 2:1. Some of the older images are cylindrical and do not cover 180 degrees vertically.

Most images on this site have been created with the following resources:

Some of the older or smaller images are from handheld photos, either from scanned slides or photos from a Pentax Optio S6, the latter providing a very helpful panorama function to align image sequences.