How Wide can I go?

Whilst on my endless summer trips I’ve gone a bit overboard taking very wide panoramas. It very easy with a digital camera to rattle off the 30% overlapping images to make a stitched panorama and I have used Autostitch to do this mostly although Microsoft’s ICE is another great stitching program and there are lots of other programs and apps. Because the wide view suits so many of the vistas I’m visiting I’m also opening out my sketchbooks to paint across two adjacent Landscape pages. This is all wonderful and enjoyable in the field but it has a downside, it takes time, in fact the bigger the panorama I want the longer the stitching and other post processing of the photos takes. On busy travel and field days I simply run out of time and/or I’m likely to fall asleep waiting for the stitching to complete in the evening.

As my LG phone got terminally ill, and misbehaved several times, I lashed out an got a new HTC U Play (why HTC, well it was not the cheapest but because my first HTC was super reliable and easy to use and is still going strong, as GPS in my camera bag, it was able to take over from the ailing LG). The UPlay was equally easy to use, the one downside is the beautiful case and screen as a bit slippery so a slip-on cover (red so I don’t leave it behind) was the first accessory. Then it was out to try out the camera, I just love it! Here is my first attempt at panorama mode.

Now that did take a few seconds to stitch in the phone but it is a wonder panorama, I might have been able replicating this with a DSLR and autostitch, which would easily take over 5 minutes or longer!

My passion for the wide view has very much moved into my instagram accounts especially @apimageo, which is still very much stuck in the 3 across grid view (you have to look at my profile to see it). I also recently notice that @packtography (he’s worth a follow) includes the camera, exposure and post processing summary with most posts. I reckon this is a great idea, so I will try to keep up including such info. Sharing your settings to me is important as an insight to let other understand your work, BTW my flickr posts have always included the extra EXIF data automatically if you are interested.