Panoramas anyone?
Creating photographic panoramas has gained a great deal of popularity over the last few years. It’s got to the stage that many compact camera designers and manufacturers have built in fairly advanced panorama-capturing functions into these cameras.
When I was in Siena in Tuscany a few years ago, grabbing a series of frames of the Duomo (cathedral) from the balcony of a nearby albergo (old school pensione style hotel), I noticed a young American couple panning their point and shoot camera across the scene to capture it as a panorama. I had my DSLR on a tripod, photographing parts of the scene in portrait orientation and overlaying each new frame with 50% of the scene in the previous frame for panoramic stitching. It took me a handful of minutes to complete the capture. It took them three seconds. And would you believe it, their point and shoot did a great job stitching the scene together!
I still came home with a decent panorama – stitched using Hugin, but there was always this nagging feeling that one day, DSLRs would have this function built into them – the “Turn and Shoot” auto panorama. Well, it appears that the day has come. Check out this video by Swiss street photographer, Thomas Leuthard, who caught this tourist using a Sony DSLR to photograph a panorama (keep your ear out for the sound of the shutter working on continuous shooting).
Oh, and by the way, this was the panorama I took from the balcony in Siena:
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