A panorama (formed from Greek πᾶν “all” + ὅραμα “sight”) is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film/video, or a three-dimensional model.

The word was originally coined by the Irish painter Robert Barker to describe his panoramic paintings of Edinburgh. Shown on a cylindrical surface and viewed from the inside, they were exhibited in London in 1792 as “The Panorama”. The motion-picture term panning is derived from panorama.

For shooting our still image panoramas, unlike our friend on the left, we use the latest professional Canon dSLR camera bodies, Canon wide angle and fish-eye lenses and Gitzo Carbon Fibre Tripods with special panorama head adaptors!

Wellington, New Zealand. View from Wrights Hill Fortress.

The “once in a lifetime” snow dump around Wellingtons northern suburbs – view from Grenada to Churton Park in the distance and the western hills of Ohariu Valley.

Grant Rawstorn Photographer.
Panoramic photography images are attractive and functional as web page headings in which the extremely wide angle of view can portray as much information as possible to a viewer at a glance, thus creating the all important first impression of your environment which then leads them to linger for longer on your website. We also like to use a panoramic image as the “splash image” which contains the link to the 360 virtual tour.

Your virtual tour photography session includes panoramic images which we can supply in low resolution for your website, or high resolution for print media.

Panorama (cnr Lambton Quay and Willis St, Wellington)

Another projection is the “little planet” with which many of our tours start as they load. This too has a variety of applications as a still image on a website.

Here is the same panorama above projected in “little planet” view