Blue Mountains Panoramas

[aquaprofunda]

Without making my first post into an ad: I LOVE MY SHINY IPHONE AND ITS SHINY, SHINY APPS.

Ahem.

On a recent sojourn to the Blue Mountains, I a) went on many walks, and b) made use of the Autostitch Panorama iPhone app.

With Autostitch, you take as many photos as you want of your subject, only making sure that there is some overlap between images. Then, in the app, you select which images you want to make the panorama out of -- no particular order required -- and hit "stitch". The app does the rest -- identifying the shared elements between the images and merging (or 'stitching', if you will) them together. The icing on the cake is that at the end it saves the finished image in the highest resolution it can.

And of course, once I'd got used to it, I played around with it a little. Hit the jump for the images.


Click through on any of these images to peruse the high res versions on Flickr.


The first image I took was fairly unambitious -- I probably only used about 10-15 images for the composite. The further away the subject, the better the app handles it -- naturally, as you turn the camera around to take the scope of shots, the perspective on the nearer subjects shifts, so the overlay ends up blurry.


This one I adore. I love that the whole frame is filled with no negative space provided by sky. I often come across settings like this while walking and struggle to photograph it in a way that doesn't end up boring, or that conveys the depth of the place. (With guest model: my travel buddy Cathy.)


After a few tries I had a go at 360° panoramas. Obviously in this shot I missed out on shooting a couple of areas (and you can see how the app composes it before I crop it). The full size of this image is about five times the width displayed here.


Here's another 360° -- I was standing in the middle of the path that crosses the flat of the falls before they go over the cliff. I think that next time I do 360s, I need to leave a deliberate gap where I want the edges of the panorama to be -- I think this one isn't perfect in composition because of that, but I find the positioning of Cathy on one side and the edges of her hands on the other is quite amusing.


This is probably my favourite. After assembling a few and thinking, "duh, why didn't I shoot UP?" I shot this one up and down as well as across -- it uses about 55 images, all up.


And then, things got a tad more creative. Cathy and I realised that, as it's not like all images are shot at once, it would be easy enough to have multiple versions of the same person in the photograph. This shot entertains me greatly, but I think I shot far too much overlap - and it would be clearer if the subject were further away, too.

... That said, it doesn't mean I don't love this shot:

...In part because of the fantastic ghostliness of some of the figures.

Might see if I can take some city scapes, next! Though getting further away from subjects is much more tricky in an urban landscape.