Evolving Photographer: Building Panoramas, Or Why Your Smartphone Alone Isn't Enough

As readers of this blog may know, I try to get outside and enjoy the natural world with my camera. And as I get more and more interested in what's out there, I seem to keep upping the ante a bit! This latest adventure involved spending 8 days on the glaciated slopes of Mount Rainier. Initially, I planned to bring my D7100, complete with specialized DIY carrying case - but when my pack weighed in at 68 pounds before adding the 3lbs of DSLR goodness, I decided to limit myself to my Samsung Galaxy S5.

Now, I've used my Galaxy S5 before on this blog, and the results were more artistic than photo realistic. You can bet that as I left my D7100 behind, I was thinking about this a lot. But, as we settled in for the night at our first camp site, I realized that I shouldn't be worried. Why, you ask? Because of the great free photo stitching software, Hugin! Sure, I'd be limited in megapixels. But I was in the middle of glacier, outside, taking landscape style shots. I could turn 10 photos into one with this software, and you'd never know that they came from a smartphone!

Let me pause here. You may be confused by what I've just said, and the title of my post. You're using your phone, silly! Why isn't that enough? Well, one other climber, our guide, Devin, took panorama shots nearly the same as I did. But he did it all "in cameraphone."

Courtesy Devin, at twitter.com/denalidevo

The photos are amazing, as you can see in this one example. But one thing comes into play here - distortion. It's that subtle fishbowl effect that appears when taking panoramas. It's not easy to get rid of, but it is possible - with software. And that's where Hugin comes into play.

In order to build the panoramas below, I took upwards of 10 individual photos. I basically created a grid of the scene that I wanted to capture, ensuring that there was plenty of overlap between each shot. This ensured that the software had many examples of common points in each set of images to stitch them together - aka do computer magic.


I began with seven separate photos

Lots of control points make for more accurate stitching

Now, Hugin allows you a lot of control with photos. I should mention that I did all of my preliminary post-processing in Lightroom. White balance, exposure levels, minor edits - I performed this on one image in Lightroom, and then batched the settings to the other six images. This ensured that each piece of the larger puzzle looked the same - no odd underexposed sections here!

Once we have all seven images imported, and the software has identified the common control points, we get this output screen. Here, I can select the type of projection that I want to base my image on. This is how we either eliminate (or increase) distortion, based on our artistic ideals for the image. Just check out my picture of the Emmons Glacier with Little Tahoma in the background - I went with some level of distortion to the picture, but that's just because I liked it that way.

Panini General Projection

Cylindrical Projection

Trans Mercator Projection

As is quite apparent, each projection created a very different image. The brighter areas are what Hugin would produce to create a "final" image. The cylindrical projection is what I made for my final image, so it is cropped properly, however the other two projections, while having the same dimensions, now include blank space within the final image. The Trans Mercator projection has also created that "fishbowl" effect that we saw in the smartphone image from Devin! But, our other choices eliminated that distortion. And this is precisely why you need a little bit more than just a smartphone to create a panorama - that is, if you want to avoid distortion!