The PANNAROMA exhibition

 

As mentioned in my earlier blog post the month long exhibition of the Panoramic photographs taken by Tomas Roma's 35 mm 1:3 flatback camera is now ongoing. The works of at least fifteen distinguished photographers including veterans like Lee Friedlander as well as many younger ones will be part of the exhibit.

More details of the exhibition (and history of the camera including how the idea was conceived plus design notes ) along with some of the panoramic photographs taken by participating photographers are available from  http://pannaroma.wordpress.com/. Click on the name of the individual photographers to view the panoramas.   

The highlights of the exhibition and a high resolution picture  of the camera can be found here .

I thank Mr. Stephen Hilger  very much for providing the information.

Exhibition of panoramics taken by the 'Pannaroma' camera

There will be a month long exhibition of panoramic photographs at New Orleans, LA taken by different photographers using the "Pannaroma" camera. 

For more details visit this site .

For those who are interested to know about this 1:3 aspect ratio, flatback 35 mm panoramic camera, made by Thomas Roma, check this blog post.

For more posts related to Roma's camera in my blog, follow this link.

The work of Gilles Peress, Raghubir Singh, and others will be part of the exhibit. Though I'm quite familiar with  Raghubir Singh's work, never knew that he used the Pannaroma :-(

Thanks to Olaf Matthes who pointed out this event to me.

Pics from Olaf's new panoramic camera

Here goes three example pics of Olaf Matthes' pannaroma inspired camera. As you can see, the 50mm Mamiya lens is very sharp. For more details of this camera view this post.

I thank Mr. Matthes for allowing to use these pictures.

The Pannaroma camera by Thomas Roma

The "P-anna-roma" camera was made by Thomas Roma. He's "an American photographer who has worked almost exclusively since 1974 exploring the neighborhoods and institutions of his native Brooklyn, photographing scenes from churches, subways and everyday life, using a homemade camera"(from wikipedia).

Professor Roma built this camera from the gutted body of a Nikon F. The picture of which appears in Joseph Meehan's book. This I beleive one of the earliest examples of converted 35mm panoramic cameras.

Quoting again from wiki "He milled an adapter out of aircraft aluminum to go between the Nikon body and a Mamiya 50mm Sekor lens. He also made a bright-line optical viewfinder for the camera. The camera was called a “Pannaroma 1X3″, making a play on words between “panorama” and Roma’s wife’s name “Anna,” to create the word "P-anna-roma"." :)

Though I can't provide a picture of this camera at this moment, some example photos are taken by Danis Santella using this camera can be found here.

You can also read a 1978 newspaper article which tells about the inventor and his invention.

Some more information on Thomas Roma can be found from the Wiki entry , an interview of him from Columbia university website (where he's a full professor) and from his website .

I'm indebted to Mr. Olaf Matthes for all these informations. Do have a look at his great handmade panoramic cameras.

Mr. Roma made other camera's too including a 6x9. I'll write about it in my next post.