Tuesday, October 5, 2010

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.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

The Digital Horizon panoramic camera





The  Italian Silvestri company is working in collaboration with the Russian Zenit company to produce a digital panoramic camera. The Zenit is well known for its Horizon(t) series of swing lens panoramic cameras.

The new camera would feature three built in units of 5MP sensor and a f/3.5 28 mm lens, and three pictures will be taken simultaneously followed by in camera stiching to produce the final panorama. Because of simultaneous capture, moving objects will not pose any problem.

You can find more information from the following links available from Photoscala, British Journal of Photography and a very informative post by Michael Przewrocki.

A pdf information brochure on this camera can be found here.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

A very useful tool for retrieving dead sites

Many great web pages become defunct in course of time. There's a very handy tool to retrieve the information from dead web sites, provided  they are archieved. You can just paste your dead link in THIS web site and if you're lucky you might be able to look at the lost contents.

I fetched the contents of many photography related sites like that of Robert Monaghan's medium format site ( and sites mentioned there)  using this tool.

A good short read on panoramic photography

I miss Marco Pauck's panoramic web site which went defunct. Here's a short but interesting account of panoramic photography, by Marco, particularly using the Horizon 202 swing lens camera.

The great handmade panoramic cameras of Josip Klarica-II


This is another great panoramic camera from Josip Klarica's collection. Marked #6 in his web page http://obscuranova.com, this is a medium format swing lens panoramic camera. 

Constructed by Duro Susic, Prague, Czech Republic, this takes 6x18 panoramic images. The lens is a Meopta 75 mm f/2.8 and three shutter speeds of 1 sec, 1 / 30 sec and 1 / 100 sec are available. The material of construction is metal and leather.

Mr. Clarica has a very distinctive style of photography and to know more details of it visit his website http://obscuranova.com and this link

I thank Mr. Klarica very much for providing the detailed description and  high resolution pics of this camera. You can download the rest of the pics from here. Please note that the copyright for the photographs of the camera belong to Josip Klarica and you may need his permission  for using any of them.


Friday, August 20, 2010

The great handmade panoramic cameras of Josip Klarica-I


Some time ago thru' a www.bing.com search I came to know about Josip Klarica, an eminent photographer from Croatia.  The opening page of his website http://obscuranova.com pointed to the great collection of cameras he has and particularly the two handmade panoramic cameras drew my attention.

This Panoramatic camera, handmade by Mr. Josip Klarica is a replica  of  the "Camera Megascope", a large format panoramic camera constructed by Friedrich Martens of Paris in 1845. 

The format of the negative produced  is 18X60 cm !!!. The lens is a vintage Symmetric anastigmat 210 mm made by  A. Ross ,of London in 1932. The exposure is made by manually turning the lens. Materials for construction include wood, leather and cardboard. 


You can have an idea how big the camera ( marked #7 in his webpage) is by looking at this picture. Quite obviously due to the huge size of the negatives the pictures they yield are also simply fascinating.

Mr. Clarica has a very distinctive style of photography and to know more details of it visit his website http://obscuranova.com and this link.

I thank Mr. Klarica very much for providing the detailed description and so many high resolution photographs of this camera. You can download and view the rest of the pictures in a ~17MB zipped file from here. Please note that the copyright for the photographs of the camera belong to Josip Klarica and you need his permission(s) for  using any of them.



Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Blog Update

I've been a little busy during the past one and half months or so to write any new blog entry. However, I collected information on some very interesting handmade panoramic cameras during this period. I'll write about them very soon, probably in a few days.

Meanwhile you can have a look at Josip Klarica's website, who has a very distinctive style of panoramic photography and  a fascinating set of handmade cameras.