Tag Archives: panoramic photography

iPhone Panoramic photos become movies – all on the iPhone

Built into the iPhone’s camera app is the ability to take pictures of tall buildings, wide for the interiors of a restaurant, simple HDR for vivid lights and even wrap around panoramic images. All of this ‘built-in’ so why do we need apps for taking pictures outside of what Apple provided? Mostly, because one solution isn’t the ‘best’ solution for everyone. Photos taken and left exactly as they are is fine, but many times there is a vision of what the photo could be so why not tune the image a bit.

In the world of panoramic photography, there has been a nice list of app options, each with their own way of doing the action of taking the photos. The early solutions required a person snap a photo then align the next photo with the previous before hitting the shutter button, then the app stitched all the photos together. After that was solutions that had a grid area that a person took photos to fill in for the app to merge. Most apps now use a graphic that two parts at the edge of the view finder which come together for the next photo to be taken. Cycloramic offers an simple, yet effective graphic to show when the next photo is being taken. The app doesn’t require alignment, it takes care of that for you. Unlike most other solutions is the ability to go back the reverse direction mid action if moving too fast for Cycloramic to have gotten a clean photo. The ability to move up/down slightly also gives more height to the resulting images too.

00 Cycloramic iPhone

If you have an iPhone 5 and a smooth/flat surface… Cycloramic will do all the work for you. A feature that put the app into everyone’s conversation when it was first introduced is how the app will vibrate the iPhone 5 to cause it to turn. Basically, place your iPhone 5 on it’s bottom edge, tap the button to take a photo, Cycloramic spins the iPhone and snaps photos as it goes. No add on hardware is required!

In the most recent update is a new feature to have the panoramic photo converted to a movie. Sometimes you want to share a photo that people can move around the 360 photo. Generally though, the message of the environment is best delivered via a controlled view which a movie does. Cycloramic 2.1 does the stitching and conversion to a movie to export all in one app.

Getting ultra wide shots with the iPhone and DMD Panorama

I’m guilty of it as many people are, thinking of Panorama apps as software to use on the iPhone to get images that go all around… a big circle image. Actually, they are great to get very wide images too, and DMD Panorama on the iPhone makes the process quick and easy.

For a period of time, there was a group of camera from the major makers that used APS (advanced photo system) film cartridges. With these camera, three image formats where possible (from Wikipedia):

– H for “High Definition” (30.2 × 16.7 mm; aspect ratio 16:9; 4×7″ print)
– C for “Classic” (25.1 × 16.7 mm; aspect ratio 3:2; 4×6″ print)
– P for “Panoramic” (30.2 × 9.5 mm; aspect ratio 3:1; 4×11″ print)

The camera and film came available about the time I was building a house that would be the first in the area of many houses. Every couple days, I could snap a shot out a corner window and get a wide image of the houses being built around me. It was much better than taking a bunch of images and trying to keep things in order over time.

For the iPhone, I have covered DMD Panorama before, the need came up for an inlet shot that one or several images wouldn’t do a good job with. The beauty of this particular app is the little Ying/Yang parts that come together as you turn so you know when the automatic shot will be taken. There is no ghost image that you have to line up the edges of the previous/next shot to. Just launch the app, aim the iPhone, click ‘Start’, and turn as a relatively quick speed (I generally slow a bit as the half circles are just coming together), then hit the finish button when you have the whole wide image captured. All done, wide angle image is sent to your iPhone photo library directly from DMD Panorama and you can move onto the next shot. No visit to the film developing shop needed. The image can actually be automatically pushed up to a hosted Web site to share with friends so there is no need to email the big image, just a link.

This is the bay, done automatically with DMD Panorama, which took three shots. The original export show was over 3200 pixels wide.

Reminder of how that ying/yang interface looks and works: Quick and easy panorama photos with the iPhone