Tuesday, March 19, 2013

New Tools and New Ways of Seeing


I love wide format for landscapes.  Not necessarily just super-wide panoramas, although those can be fun. Since I don't have a real panoramic-format camera (there are some), the two normal techniques I use are a 6 x12 roll film back that fits on my 4x5 field cam, or the usual digital method of shooting multiple overlapping frames from a tripod and stitching them together later.  Make that I "didn't" have a real panoramic camera, because the iPhone's new pano capture feature is the real deal. Considering that you not only don't need a tripod, but you are shooting hand held with the camera in motion, the results can be pretty remarkable.
It's all instantly and seamlessly patched together... and best of all, you're actually shooting in vertical format, which flips the full 3264 pixel WIDTH of the camera over to the VERTICAL... and then you can extend the horizontal as far as you want. ( I kind of have trouble twisting my body enough to fill the entire possible frame:)  You don't need to utilize the entire possible width of the panorama.. you can stop anywhere that looks good and end up with a file resolution that rivals many dslr's. This one, before I cropped some of it off, came out to over 30" wide at 300 dpi! That's some printable stuff, folks.. and the grainy, soft, low dynamic range pics that you would have expected, even a couple years ago, are history due to advances in the technology.
I'll have some more to say about how much I have been using my phone cam in place of a standard dslr recently, and why.

3 comments:

Roger Gauthier said...

Oh but I do agree, Mark! You did something very nice here, and you used one ferric tool indeed. I do panoramas too with my iPhone 5 and by God it's surprising. And on top of that you can drop it and it won't break… :-)

Just imagine, photographers 20 years from now will laugh very hard at us!

Mark Alan Meader said...

Thanks Roger...
Not sure about the "won't break" part though:).. I always worry about dropping it, a lot. Looking into some potential solutions for that problem.

Mary Howell Cromer said...

Very creative, very nice. I like what I see, very beautiful~