Got a landscape to capture? Maybe it’s time to enter the wide world of panoramic photography

It’s a wide, wide, wide, wide world these days, and your iPhone is partly to blame.

Panoramic pictures have been popular since at least the 19^th century, when painters labored for months over massive images (like this Gettysburg scene) and photographers used swiveling lenses atop a tripod to capture group photos. (Some still do, as this timeline attests.)

Wide-screen movies took the trend further. By 1963, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” was being released in Ultra Panavision with an aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1 -- an image almost three times wider than high.

More recently came software that lets you “stitch together” digital images. And then there’s Apple’s iPhone 5, which has a simple software tool for shooting a wide photo without a tripod.

Once you know that option is there, it’s hard to resist.

Three of the pictures in the gallery above – the first, eighth and ninth – were taken with an iPhone. (Click here for a larger view.) The others were shot with a standard digital single-lense reflex camera, then cropped. That doesn’t give you the same wrap-around effect as a true panorama -- for striking examples of the genre, look here or here.

But if you’re taking travel pictures, a low, wide shape often works wonderfully with landscape pictures and can be a refreshing change from the 2-by-3 shape of so many photographs.