The beauty of panoramic images
A wider view
I have always been fascinated with the “wide angle view”of the world. One of my favourite lenses ever was a Sigma 10-20mm that I had on my Nikon D80, it was designed for a crop sensor, but gave an amazing wide angle view of the scene, it was tack sharp and had minimal distortion, I loved it. It was my go to lens when I travelled to places like Antarctica, and I managed to get some amazing landscape shots there.
At some point I also fell in love with the art of pano stitching to give an even wider angle of view, a 180 degree view if you like. This technique gave me a whole new view on some scenes and the results were often unexpected and spectacular. I really loved how the scenes looked after the pano stitch was done, it looked pretty much the same as what I saw, but it was somehow flattened out and lengthened in some way, so it looked a little different, but good different. There was more of a context and a different perspective to the scene which really worked well.
The challenge with the photo stitching was you never knew what you would get until you processed the image afterwards at home. Sometimes the scene worked and other times it didn’t. There was no way to test it in camera to see how it worked…maybe there will be “built in” photo stitching software in cameras in time..but not anytime soon as stitching a full pano takes a lot of processing power, but maybe a preview? Might be possible…should be possible….anyway, I digress!
A few years later, one of my iPhones had a panoramic function built into the camera. to be honest, I kind of scoffed at it and never used it as I thought that there is no way this would give any reasonable results as I knew what it took to get a really good panoramic stitched image. Initially, I was right, I tried it a few times and it was glitchy, but Apple, being Apple, worked really hard at improving the functionality and now its really pretty good. I use it fairly often, sometimes to see what a potential pano shot would look like before I set up my tripod and camera to take the shot and sometimes, I use it jus to take the shot, because it actually looks good. The one challenge is that you can’t zoom in very much into a scene, so there are limitations, but given that, it still works really well as you can see in these images below!
Does this mean that I won’t be doing any pano’s with my SLR? of course not, but what the iPhone does give me is the flexibility to try the panoramic look and see if it works. In most cases, it works really well and I have rarely been disappointed. I often find myself using it on many different scenes, I have even tried walking alongside a scene and see how that works, that has been a bit of a hit and miss, but not too bad in some cases.
I think the key in photography is to experiment and try things, try and explore new things, try and use tools in a way that is different from their intended use i.e. vertorama in iPhone. For me, experimentation is the key. Always make sure you get the money shot or the postcard shot first, at least you will have that for your travel book, but then, play around a bit, try different techniques, bring the pano stitching into your shots and see how that goes. If anything, it will give you a fresh look on the scene and that can make a difference to how you view it!
Either way, keep experimenting and keep shooting!