This is a peripheral portrait of me taken by Andrew Davidhazy, a now-retired professor of Imaging and Photographic Technology at RIT.

A peripheral photograph attempts to capture a 360° periphery of the subject. Conceptually, this requires the camera to traverse a path around the subject. This is similar to strip photography that is used for aerial surveillance.

The Strip Photography Technique

In aerial strip photography, a camera aims downward from an airplane's fuselage. The film moves continuously at the same rate as the moving image projected onto it, synchronized with the airplane's velocity. An adjustable-width slit at the focal plane provides exposure control.

Aerial surveillance strip photography represents a special case of peripheral photography where the subject is flat (yes, the earth can be considered to be flat for this discussion!) and the camera moves parallel to the periphery. For roughly cylindrical objects like human faces, the camera must traverse a circular path. Equipment for this has been designed for applications such as computer tomography and panoramic radiographs in dentistry.

Satellite Imaging Applications

Low-orbit satellite (approximately 450 km altitude) imaging also employ this technique using what is called a push broom sensor. The satellite camera has no shutter and uses an 8.8 meter (30-foot) f/14.7 lens. The sensor is 13 inches wide and contains 27,552 pixels, imaging an area 16.8 km wide. Each pixel represents 0.61 meters.

A 2008 Popular Photography article, Google Earth -- How They Do It! by James Lewis explained how most Google Earth images were (are?) created by DigitalGlobe, one of their main content providers. The article is no longer available at its original location but can be found on archive.org.

For more technical details, see the QuickBird Imagery Products FAQ and Comparative Analysis of Pixel-Level Fusion Algorithms and a New High-Resolution Dataset for SAR and Optical Image Fusion for even more details.

The Turntable Method

The portrait here uses a different approach: instead of moving the camera, we rotate the subject. I was placed on a turntable and rotated in synchronization with a strip of polaroid film moving past a slit at the focal plane of the camera. Because of subject movement and irregularities in synchronization, some obvious distortions are present.

The system represents a low-budget solution: a Polaroid camera was stripped of its shutter and fitted with a slit was at the focal plane. A sheet of Polaroid film is pulled out slowly across the slit and out of the camera at the same rate that a turntable rotates (on which the subject is standing).

For more information, check out Professor Davidhazy's article on his improvised scanning digital camera.