Since the fall of 2003 I’ve been teaching a course in panoramic photography at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio. In the early years, it proved difficult to attract enough students to register for the course. Because it is an elective, there is no guaranteed pipeline of students who must take the course to complete their degree requirements. We also discovered that there was generally a very low level of awareness among students of the very existance of panoramic images and a lack of understanding of how making panoramas could influence and improve their experience of photography in general.

It was clear that listing the course in the academic catalogue and making announcements in other photo classes to encourage students to register for the course was not adequate to generate the interest level needed to fill the class on a regular basis. In 2005, I began making large format prints of some of the more interesting student work and posting them on the walls of the imaging lab, the hallways outside the photo lab and anywhere else we could find some wall space. This helped, but we still had to cancel a class because enrollment fell one student short of the minimum. So, in the spring of 2006, I began creating a series of posters using student images and a soft-sell sales pitch to try to raise the awareness and level of excitement about this course to the point where we could count on filling one class each semester it was offered.

The project proved very successful in attracting many of the best photo students as well as those whose interest leans more to the electronic imaging aspect of the process. Students who have completed the course have been widely recognized at the annual student art show in the Lakeland Gallery and the course is nearing the level of a “must do” for most of our more serious students.

Below are images of the four posters that have been designed so far. Each is 28 inches wide and features an image created by a student who completed the course in the previous semester. While there are many exciting images produced by each class, I have always selected an image from the most recent class because the creator of the image is more likely to be familiar to the next group of students. I think it’s more motivating if prospective students can talk to a current or former student directly about their experience in the class. The poster image, complete with credit line and copyright notice, encourages that kind of interaction.

Each poster also includes a three-word slogan or tag-line. My hope is that students will begin to look forward to the next poster, wondering which image will be chosen and what the tag-line will be. Where wall space is available, we have left posters from previous semesters in place so that students will see all the images and read all the tag-lines.

#1 — image by Adam O'Neill

#2 —image by Alex Slitz

#3 —image by Anna Zimmerman

#4 —image by Aaron Schramm