Digital Photography Hacks 11, 82, 89 - HACK 82: Get the Big Picture with a Little Camera Phone
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HACK 82: Get the Big Picture with a Little Camera Phone: If a scene is just too big to fit in your little camera phone, shoot a series of images and stitch them together.
Have you ever photographed a breathtaking landscape or something extremely tall, such as a giant redwood or skyscraper, only to feel a little disappointed when looking at the image on the computer screen? The scale of the scene didn’t survive the translation to the computer.
One reason is that the conventional camera has a monocular field of view, which is much smaller than the stereoscopic field of view that our two eyes provide. This issue is compounded by the camera phone’s generally low resolution (sub-megapixel) and narrow depth of field; objects are not sharp, except for a narrow range of distance from the camera. You also might not be able to back up far enough to get a large vista or object entirely in a single frame.
One way to solve this problem is to photograph the scene or object in segments and then assemble the pieces into a single large image. The technique, called a panorama [Hack #19], is pretty simple. Figure 7-14 shows three pictures stitched together into one.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when you’re creating these types of images:
Decide which kind of panoramic image you want to create. The two most likely choices are horizontal and vertical.
Some digital cameras provide on-screen tools to help you line up stitched images as you’re shooting them. Camera phones, however, do not have this feature. You can work around this by visually scanning the area you want to photograph and choosing visual segmentation points to help you line up the photographs and create assembly segments. The rule of thumb is to overlap each frame by 30%.
Camera phones don’t have sockets that you can attach to tripods to ensure smooth panning. So, this is hand-holding country. To produce the best results, minimize your body movement when you’re photographing each segment. I recommend keeping your feet in a single spot throughout the entire process. Twist your waist, while keeping your back as vertical as possible, for horizontal panorama scenes. When photographing vertical scenes, try to bend your shoulders and waist straight back (when shooting upwards) or forward (when shooting down). These behaviors minimize segment mismatches that create unusable visual areas.
Bring the photo segments into a photo-stitching (sometimes referred to as photo-merging) application. A number of general-purpose, commercial photo-editing applications include photo-stitching tools, such as Photomerge in Photoshop CS and Elements.
Most applications automate the bulk of the actual photo-stitching process. However, there are usually options to adjust for different ways of producing and merging segmented images. You should experiment with these different methods to learn which ones work best with your photographic technique.
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