Make Great Panoramic Shots With Your Cell Phone Camera

This is one of our most popular stories so I am re-running it today for all our new readers.

Sometimes, a little how-to project can break up the day. Other times, it can suck the life out of you and drain hours away. (More on my monolithic MPEG player project later.)

This project luckily is easy to do and allows you to have fun with you cell phone camera - something that got old fast for me after the newness wore off. This came from Digital Photography Hacks.

–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.

–Standalone photo-stitching tools, such as ArcSoft PanoramaMaker , are also available. For this project, I used the PhotoStitch application that came bundled with my Canon PowerShot G3 digital camera. You can also find open source photo-stitching tools associated with the Panorama Tools project (http://panotools.sourceforge.net/).

–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.

Step By Step Instructions Here

Send us your pic and I’ll post a few!