These photos were taken with a special kind of rotating camera that can take a complete 360-degree view from a single point.  The camera is homemade, but the operating principle has been around for over 100 years and several commercial camera models are available that operate this way.

 These pictures can be fascinating to look at, especially when printed large.

Each of these photos shows about a 180-degree field of view.  Click on the photos to see a larger version, but realize they will take longer to download.  Use the BACK button to get back here after viewing a larger picture.

These pictures were scanned with the HP PhotoSmart S20 scanner.  It’s (as of 1999 or so) the only consumer device I know of that can scan this unusual film size at high resolution.  Each of these pictures uses about 4.5 frames on a roll of film.  A complete 360-degree picture uses about 9 frames, so I can only get about 4 of those on a 36-exposure roll of film.

There are several panoramic photos from my trip to China on the China Panoramics page, and  some from Hawaii on the Hawaii Panoramics page.

Boulder, Colorado, May 1997

Trafalgar Square, London, England, May 1998.  The older gentleman on the far left was a retired photographer who approached me after I took the picture and said, “Is that a homemade panoramic camera?”

Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming, August 1997

Lobby of a building in England, September 1999.  This is an experiment using the shift lens feature of my camera.  Two pictures were taken, one with the lens shifted up and one with the lens shifted down, without moving the tripod.  I scanned the two individually and placed them together in PhotoShop.  If you look at the higher resolution version, you may be able to see that the join is not perfect.  Apparently there is some nonuniformity in the motion of the film in the camera.  I didn’t do any exposure adjustment or blending in the scans.  The uniformity of tone is surprising.

Hanging Lake, Colorado, September 2000

Times Square, New York City, October 2000

Horseshoe Falls, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, October 2000

Colorado Rockies Baseball Game, at Coors Field, Denver, April 10, 2002

You can see more about my homemade camera, including a picture, here.