I’ve long been a fan of panoramic images, though since moving to digital for most of my work I’ve taken far fewer (and there are still a few rolls of film containing them waiting for me to develop them.) Having tried a few panoramas on film by combining several exposures (so much easier with digital!) I saved long and hard for a rather expensive Japanese Widelux swing lens model in around 1990 and worked fairly hard with it and a cheap Ukranian Horizon 202 I acquired a few years later.
(See it larger on my Lea Valley web site)
With digital you can fairly easily stitch images to make panoramas – especially with static subjects, but it is hard to work with people, and cameras such as the Horizon or the no longer made Hasselblad XPan – a superb rectilinear panoramic camera, especially when fitted with the wide-angle 30mm lens, which became another favourite of mine, still have a role.
What brought panoramic photography to my mind was a fine set of black and white images, The Valley, taken in Afghanistan in late 2007 by Hungarian freelance Balazs Gardi of VII Network which includes some panoramics. Gardi first came to my attention when he won a Getty Grant in 2005 for his work on Roma. I’ve also mentioned ‘The Valley’ before but it was brought back to mind by a recent mention on PDN Pulse, where I also read news of another panorama currently arriving from Mars, which will take several Martian days to complete!