Digital Photography Hacks

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.

Figure 7-14. A panorama created from three camera-phone images

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 ...