iPhone AutoStitch Panorama
I have a lot of nature photographs because I live next to a large park. Not only do I enjoy being able to get out and away, but I also walk my dogs all the time. The park has two ponds. One is a relatively large pond, and that is what is featured here.
Landscapes naturally lend themselves to panoramic photographs. There are different ways to achieve a panorama, I’ll talk about three ideas. Having a wide angle lens, taking a shot, and then cropping out the top and bottom areas leaving only the main landscape is one method. The iPhone already has a pretty wide angle, so what you see is what you get on the screen. Just crop accordingly for the final result. For the iPhone, tis is a bit of a problem, I wouldn’t expect a print that is much larger than a 4 x 10, or at the most about 5 x 12. These are not small sizes and will still make a great print to hang on any wall.
Another option for creating panoramas would be a more creative approach. I would suggest something like a general series of photographs. I am working on something similar with a series I have done on the iPhone. The series are of circles, and the other of square wood carvings. The idea is to take these images and just lay them out somehow to create a larger image. This doesn’t mean physically attaching photographs, but it could. Think of a photo-collage. However, the images do not even have to be in the same frame. The direction I am taking with my series is to frame four images separately, and just hang them side by side.
The last type I am going to talk about is when multiple images are stitched together in a single photograph. The image above is exactly that. This photograph was a series of about 22 photographs that I took, and then stitched them all together with a photo editing tool. This may sound complicated, and like a lot of work, but it took about 3 minutes to photograph, and about the same amount of time to stitch them all together.
Cedars had fallen all throughout the woods over the winter and one had been blocking my quick route to the pond for quite some time. I was relieved the other day to find that the fallen cedar had been removed from the path, and I was able to take my dogs on a quick walk up to the pond again. We stopped at the water, and I decided this was a perfect time to try out the new stitching program. I stood there for quite some time, shooting up, down, left and right. I didn’t have much time, and I wasn’t sure what I would need to do to stitch the photographs together, so I got the shots and headed off to start the day.
Last night I settled down and had the opportunity to click away and try out the new photo-stitching. I was very pleased. I am sure with some practice, and some better scenery, I should be able to get some incredible panoramas. All I did to create this image was select the images I wanted to stitch together, stitch them, and then crop the final image to fit into a nice long panoramic. I imported the image into Aperture, did some touch-up, and tagging and I was done.
The application I used was called AutoStitch. I bought it for $2.99 on the app store. The company site is cloudburstresearch.com.