256
cameras are those which are fi tted with a wide-angle
lens. The fi rst panoramic camera to use such a lens
was devised by an Englishman, Thomas Sutton, in
- Sutton was granted a British patent for a spheri-
cal, water-fi lled lens that gave a fi eld of view of 120
degrees. He is said to have been inspired by looking at
a glass ‘snowstorm’ souvenir, popular with Victorian
tourists, that a friend had brought home from Paris.
Cameras incorporating Sutton’s innovative lens were
made by London camera makers Frederick Cox and,
later, Thomas Ross. To compensate for the lens’s cur-
vature of fi eld, these cameras used curved glass plates.
This meant, however, that they had to be supplied with
a special, curved sensitising tank and a curved printing
frame. It is estimated that only around thirty Sutton
panoramic cameras were made.
Colin Harding
See Also: Panoramic Photography; and Sutton,
Thomas.
Further Reading
Coe, Brian, Cameras: From Daguerreotypes to Instant Pictures,
Nordbok, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1978.
Polden, Brian, Photography at Length, Photographica World, No.
100, 8; No. 102, 33; No. 104, 11; No. 106, 22; No. 109, 20.
Traill Taylor, J., Photographic Panoramas and the Means of
Making Them, The British Journal Photographic Almanac,
1892, 517–528.
CAMERA DESIGN: STEREO CAMERAS
The stereoscope was devised in 1838 by Charles Wheat-
stone to demonstrate the principle of binocular vision
and its role in depth perception. Using pairs of drawings
to represent the slightly different images seen by each
eye, the stereoscope used mirrors to superimpose them
into a single image with a three-dimensional appear-
ance. With the invention of photography a decade later,
the images used in the stereoscope could be infi nitely
more varied and detailed, and the effect of solidity more
startling. Initially, a single camera was used to produce
two daguerreotypes or calotypes in succession; the
operator would move the camera a couple of inches to
one side between exposures in the attempt to produce
pictures that corresponded as closely as possible to what
was seen by the two eyes. This was a process of trial
and error—once superimposed in the stereoscope, the
effect of three-dimensionality might be compromised
by inadequate (or exaggerated) distance between the
two exposures, or by alteration of the camera angle, the
subject’s position, or lighting conditions.
In 1849 Sir David Brewster invented a refracting,
lens-based stereoscope that was more portable and
easier to use than Wheatstone’s refl ecting model, and
in 1851 the wet-plate collodion process was introduced.
These two innovations cemented the alliance between
stereoscopy and photography and gave rise to the ste-
reoscopic industry. Photographers and camera manufac-
turers immediately turned their attention to the specifi c
requirements of the Brewster stereoscope. Stereographs
were—two 8.2 cm square pictures, separated by about
0.6 cm, mounted side by side on a 11.4 × 17.8-cm card.
They were standardized, and mass-produced photo-
graphic images, dominating the commercial market
from 1852 to 1880.
There were very early cameras which took two sepa-
rate exposures on two separate plates. The camera body
slid on a baseboard taking two separate and sequential
square plates (Powell 1858 for example). Another device
mounted pairs of cameras (Jacob Brett, 1853), where
another camera had a sliding lens panel which took two
sequential images on the same plate (Spencer, 1854).
Two basic types of cameras were designed to produce
stereoscopic pairs: single-lensed and double-lensed.
British engineer and photographic enthusiast Latimer
Clark presented the fi rst single-lensed stereoscopic
camera at the fourth meeting of the Photographic So-
ciety, in 1853. Clark mounted an ordinary box camera
on a grooved baseboard that allowed its position to be
changed quickly and consistently between exposures.
The direction or angle of the camera could be adjusted
by pivoting the rulers mounted on the board. This ac-
commodated an early theory of stereoscopic picture-
making, known as toeing-in, according to which the
camera’s position should be adjusted and angled for the
second exposure so that near objects in the center of the
fi rst exposure were also in the center of the second.
Clark further improved the single-lensed camera with
a repeating back which allowed a stereoscopic pair to be
produced on a single plate. With the camera pushed to
the right side of the baseboard, the fi rst exposure (repre-
senting what the right eye would see) was made on the
left side of the plate. The camera was then slid to the left,
the dark slide pushed home, and the second exposure
(the left eye’s view) made next to the fi rst on the right
side of the plate. Transposed in printing, the resulting
pair could be viewed in the Brewster stereoscope.
Lens distance emerged as the most controversial
aspect of stereophotography. A separation greater than
the normal 6.4 cm between the eyes produces a slight
reduction in scale but an increased illusion of solidity,
enhancing landscape views in particular. Single-lensed
camera with long baseboards, such as that designed
by Andrew Ross, allowed experimentation with these
hyperstereoscopic effects, which some criticized as
deceptive, a perversion of the principle of binocular
vision.
Double-lensed camaras fi xed the distance between
the two exposures, typically at about 8.9 cm, slightly