Panoramic Photography

Nowadays, photography is a very common and affordable hobby. Most people may have their own digital camera (DC), and even cell phones are equipped with a tiny camera for you to take pictures . I bought my first camera a few years ago, and it was a decent DC with 3 mega pixels. I still remember I was so addicted to taking photos when I was studying in the University of Warwick, especially when I was traveling during holidays. I was so excited to explore things which I had never seen in Hong Kong.

A Panoramic Photograph is a photo which exceeds a normal photo ratio 4:3 or 3:2, and reaches 2:1 or 4:1. The viewing angle of panoramic photos are usually wide. The camera which I use to take panoramic photos is called XPan; it is designed to take photos in both normal (36x24mm) and panoramic (65x24mm) format on standard 135 film. Why do I like to take panoramic photos so much? There are a few reasons:

1. The normal 3:2 photos are not always enough to capture wonderful landscape
   (e.g. Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour)

2. Panoramic view gives a more comfortable feeling as it looks more similar to what I see with my naked eyes

3. It allows me to think a bit outside of the normal 3:2 box

Besides XPan, there are some DCs which allow you to take panoramic photos by stitching several shots together, and some cameras are designed to take native panoramic (16:10) photos. For professional photographers, they will use other equipments to take panoramic photos, such as medium or large format film cameras to capture the scene with high details; the film size are 6x12cm / 6x17cm or even 6x24cm, which can capture a lot of information on a single photo.

I like to take photos with my Xpan. You may visit my web site http://xpan.hk to check out some of photos taken by me.

XPAN SAMPLES (by Dom)