iPhone Pano

Monday August 4, 2014 at 1:28pm photography, iphone Comments (0) »
Highway bridges over Boone Lake iPhone 4s pano of a pair of highway bridges over Boone Lake.  Happens to be very near a geocache.
iPhone 4s pano of a pair of highway bridges over Boone Lake.  Happens to be very near a geocache.

So I have to say, I've generally been impressed with the iphone's (4s) "pano" function, wherein you can pan the device's camera and it will create an image from the entire scene.  It does a pretty impressive job of stitching photos together in real time to create one seamless image.  About the only "quality" issue is the tearing you can get from motion - either because the subject is moving or because you're panning a little too fast.  This is pretty easy to control in the latter case.  For the former, however, the process has issues if there are any significant movements in the scene (I've actually taken a single pano in which my daughter appeared twice).  Still, for landscapes and otherwise basically still scenes, it's a lot of fun.

One of the more interesting qualities of the pano photographs is how distortion manifests.  Due to the lens perspective as it moves, there is significant horizontal distortion as the processor stitches everything together, but there is virtually no vertical distortion.  The end result gives you fisheye-like curvature on horizontal aspects across the pan, but, unlike a fisheye lens, vertical lines remain straight.

Used correctly, the pano actually does a good enough job that it can be difficult to tell that what you're looking at is a distorted perspective and not simply an area from a much narrower angle of view if you're not personally familiar with the space pictured.

~PS

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