Photaf™ is an app for Android smart phones that automates taking and sharing panoramic photos. It has an automatic mode that uses the phone’s compass to guide positioning the camera to take overlapping images, and the shutter is clicked automatically in each new position. The stitched panorama can then be uploaded to the Photaf site, e-mailed, or shared on facebook. It does all the basics well, and panoramic snapshots are more fun than ordinary snapshots. Squeezing the best quality from Photaf requires some care, as we will discuss.

San Gregorio Beach, California, taken with Photaf on a Droid X

A higher resolution version is here. It’s the default resolution for e-mailing images.

Point Lobos is one of the world’s great scenic places. While the rocky shore and surf are reliable, sunshine there is not. We were lucky recently and had brilliant sun along with spring wild flowers. With all those things helping, it’s not too difficult to take good pictures. We drove to the Bird Rock area, at the end of the short park road. To make photography a more interesting problem, add some kids running near the edge of the ocean bluff.

The city of Ithaca, New York, boasts having over a hundred waterfalls and gorges within ten miles. The web led me to one of the more noted, Ithaca Falls. My goal for photographing such sights is to answer the question: “What was it like?” To start with, it was cold. Beyond that, the falls were beautiful, the stream from the falls was in a gorge, and there were a few tourists enjoying the scenery.

I took two still frames to stitch into a vertical panorama. Usually auto exposure helps, but this time the misty portion of the image is overexposed to pure white. That makes the vegetation in the other frame, autoexposed without the white sky, relatively too light. The task in Photoshop™ is then to darken the pure white sky to restore some of that rainy day atmosphere, then get the vegetation in the lower part of the spliced panorama to reasonably match the upper.

The grand landscapes of Ansel Adams generally do not include tourists in the foreground gawking at the spectacle along with Ansel. That 8” x 10” film was pricey so he had to be rather picky about subject matter. A click away with a digital camera, so we can afford to experiment. Including human subjects lends scale to the scenes, gives cues to the era, and tells more about what it was like to have been at the place. Moreover, tourists are preoccupied so they tend not to care if they happen to be in your pictures.

I like wide angle shots, but I usually quit at splicing two frames horizontally or three frames vertically. Going to four our more frames spliced horizontally produces a long skinny picture. There are not many subjects well suited to such a long format, and when a good subject is found there are not many ways to effectively display the results. But sometimes, I just can’t resist.

When the sky is reasonably exposed, the foreground is reduced to featureless shadow. When the foreground is reasonably exposed, the sky blanks out in overexposure. The tricks is to take two frames that overlap very near the horizon. When a Photomerge™ panorama is made, both the sky and foreground detail are retained.

Multilevel indoor shopping malls provide good subject matter for spliced panoramas that use four images in a 2 × 2 array. Activities on the levels provide a doll house effect, with many small “rooms” in the scene to view. I took this panorama at the Newpark Mall in Newark, California recently:

Redwoods do tend to be tall, at least the old ones. One problem in making a redwood look tall in a photo is getting back far enough to get the whole tree in view. Other redwoods get in the way. If you get a view down a path that shows the whole tree, the scale is lost.

These images show advantages and disadvantages of splicing. Notice that the exposures are different in the two images. You can see the difference in the sand area, where the sand in the bottom image is overexposed to the point where detail is lost.