Panoramic Photographs Collection
This database showcases over 90 panoramic photographs from the Special Collections Visual Materials Collection. Displayed with the ability to zoom into the smallest details of the photograph, this digital collection features such exemplary images such as Front St. in Dawson City around the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, sweeping city views of Seattle after the turn of the century and the memorable Mississippi flood of 1927. Other photographs feature group portraits, city scenes, and landscapes covering such topics as Pacific Northwest labor and political history, University of Washington campus scenes, and ethnic groups especially Japanese American organizations.
Dawson, intersection of Front St. and Second Ave., Yukon Territory, August 17, 1899
Read a short essay on the History of Panoramic Photography.
About the Database
This digital collection was created with the CONTENTdm software’s innovative program, JPEG 2000 which enables larger materials to be displayed in a higher quality, more usable online format. It allows viewers to see image details that would be difficult or impossible to see at the lower resolutions used in the normal software. This new software includes pan and zoom capabilities which allow one to move in and out of the image and move across the image to display the details. JPEG 2000 software is particularly valuable for providing access to photographic panoramas since large documents are made of fine details which researchers need to be able to see clearly. The materials presented in this digital collection were scanned from original photographs as TIFF files using a large format Graphtec CSX300-09 scanner, resized and enhanced using Adobe PhotoShop, to achieve the best and clearest possible digital image and loaded into the Contentdm JPEG 2000 software and linked with descriptive metadata. Additional panoramas were created by stitching together separately scanned images with Adobe PhotoShop to create composites.
The Panoramic Photograph Collection was supervised by Kristin Kinsey. Research and metadata was done by Wesley Nelson in 2010. The photographs in this database are selections from the Visual Materials Collection held by the UW Libraries Special Collections Division.
