30 Animal Panorama Fails That Are So Bad They’re Good

For millennials perhaps the earliest memory we having of getting anything close to a "panoramic" shot on film was to turn the camera from vertical to horizontal, but panoramic photography goes all the way back to the first invention of photography itself in 1839. There was a desire to show the landscapes of cities, so photographers invented the first panoramas by placing two or more daguerreotype plates - the earliest photos set on copper plates- side by side to create the illusion. It is said that the first panoramas were made up of eleven plates.

Some of the earliest panoramas were created during the civil wart, taken by George Barnard for the Union Army. They were printed from two or more wet-plate negatives that had been exposed in a conventional camera. The wet-plates were coated with an emulsion, sensitized and exposed.The camera was rotated to the next section of the panorama after each exposure in order to make a new negative, When the negatives reached the studio they were placed on a sensitized sheet of photographic paper and placed in the sun. Next they were fixed, washed, trimmed and arranged for the panoramic finished photograph.

In the late 19th century they began to manufacture cameras created specifically for producing panoramas. The cameras either had a swing-lens, in which the lens would rotate while the film remained stationary or 360-degree rotation cameras, where both the camera and the film rotated. The first mass produced panoramic camera was the Al-Vista, introduced in 1898. Most mass-produced panoramic cameras used a swing lens.