There’s nothing like a good illustration or photo to liven up a web page or a blog post. Whether it’s the latest Manufactured Home on your lot or in your community, a photo with a little more punch will draw attention to you message.
If you sometimes use an iPhone to take photos for your blog, you’re going the like the new app I found yesterday morning.
It’s call Pano and will set you back $2.99. What it does is let you take a series of photos and stitches them together to form a panoramic image. Five minutes after installing the app, I took the photo below – actually a series of four photos taken from left to right.
My initial success emboldened me and I went into the field in search of more things to photograph. We have a sprawling Manufactured Housing Community in town and I thought it would make a good subject.
My first try demonstrated a potential difficulty. Standing in the sun with the view screen on my iPhone unshaded made it very difficult to see the partially ghosted image that Pano provides in the view screen to align subsequent shots. As a result I failed to properly align the images and wound up with a double image where frames one and two overlapped:
A second try taking a little more care to shade the view screen gave me an immediate improvement:
Those were both four images stitched together by Pano. Next I decided to try adding a 5th image to the mix to widen the scope of the image. As you can see, I lined it up pretty well and the only issue was the wires which were near the edge of the frames and had too much curvature to blend together correctly.
I was pretty happy with what the app had provided so far so while sitting in truck waiting for the last image to render (it takes a few moments depending on how complex the image is), I decided to try and use it in a very confined space – the cab of my F-150.
Remember that this image was taken hand-held, with me sitting behind the wheel holding the phone as close to my body as could while attempting to align the frames. For a first try, I think it came out OK.
The app can give you enough frames to do a 360 degree panorama. You don;t have to be precise at the point of overlap, but the closer you are, the easier the app has making an invisible seam. I have no doubt we’ll see some creative uses of this application as people think of new things to do with it.