Three images of Boscastle, Cornwall taken with an iPhone.
When vertical becomes horizontal
Not long back I visited the Lake District, Wast Water to be specific, and wrote a weblog concerning photographing the place with nothing but an iPhone and an App called Pano. I’ve been on my travels again and discovered that Pano also works when you turn it 90° and create vertical panoramic images see above.
Pano stitches images you take with it on the fly merging them into one long photo. If you ignore the landscape mode warning and turn the camera there’s no reason that verticle images can be made instead on horizontal. Why would you want to do that? Well, for aethetic reasons some people may like the long thin image ratio as opposed to short and fat but you may also prefer this method for exposure reasons.
The exposure reasoning
With the above images typically four photos are shot and merged together. Each image is exposed by the camera using it’s automatic and none flexible exposure system, and for once this is a bonus. Essentially the iPhone tries to give a correct exposure for what hits the sensor, normally that means an average reading where skies often burn out and foregrounds are too dark. Too understand this try moving your phone around a scene and you’ll see the camera correcting itself as the light intensity changes. Now if you can organise your picture into areas or zones of similar exposures you can render the images or paint the picture a zone at a time. This is pretty easy to do vertically with foreground, middle-ground and sky. Dark foreground is thus rendered correctly exposed and hot sky turn from white to deep blue with clouds. Pano does the rest when it merges them together. Fundamentally we are producing a HDR picture without the faffing in Photoshop with multiple exposures. It takes a bit of trial and error to get it right, if you think of it as a kind of automatic zone system for the cameraphone age you’ll not go far wrong.
It’s definitely something I’ll be trying more often from now on and I encourage other people to have a go and let me know how you get on.