In my last lesson diary I talked about High Dynamic Range photography, this week I'm going to go over how to stitch your images together to get great panorama pictures.
Full sized image
Lets face it there are lots of times when what you want to take a picture of wont fit in the entire frame of your phone/camera. If you are using a single lens reflex camera you can simply swap out for a wider angle lens but you can't do that with your phone. Sure, there are add on lenses you can buy now for the iPhone but how many of you have those? Not many I'm sure.
Fortunately there are apps now that make stitching multiple pictures together easy.
iOS 6 brought a panorama option to the camera app for the iPhone 4s and 5. The new panorama function works great, I use it occasionally. The problem is what do you do with this long skinny picture once you've taken it? They are hard to print, mat and frame. The other problem is you have to shoot on the same horizontal or vertical plane. What if you need to go both horizontal and vertical to fit your whole subject in?
The app I use for stitching multiple images together on my iPhone is AutoStitch. There are other options out there, this is just the one I finally settled on.
In the example below you can see I took 6 separate pictures and then stitched them together. I used the iPhone's camera app to take these pictures but AutoStitch does have an option to take each image within the app itself.
Tip: Only rotate the camera on axis while taking the multiple pictures. Hold the camera in one place and rotate it left, right, up and down from that one spot. Also make sure to overlap your images. AutoStitch needs to see a familiar item in each shot in order to line things up and stitch them together.
Which I then crop to this:
More examples
This is two horizontal pictures put together:
You can also stitch together multiple
High Dynamic Range images like I did here:
8 Pictures:
This is two horizontal pictures:
Jimmy Buffett in San Diego
10 pictures:
Here is another shot made up of multiple HDR pictures. Taking these kinds of shots takes patients, you have to create an HDR for each panel, not moving the camera while Pro HDR creates the HDR picture. You then save that image and rotate the camera to shoot the next shot.
Remember: You can review past lessons at the iPhone Photography Group page.