One neat feature of Apple’s new iOS 6 released last week is that it added a panorama mode to the camera on my iPhone 4S. When enabled, I can simply pan the phone across a scene and it automatically stitches together a panorama. I hadn’t had a chance to test out the new feature on an appropriate scene until yesterday when I was at Target Field to watch the Twins lose to the Yankees. Though I am still on paternity leave from work through the end of this week, the game was a fundraising event that I didn’t feel I could miss. Plus, it was a beautiful, sunny fall day and I ended up really enjoying myself.
I mention the weather because the shot that I took from the left field bleachers was a tricky one in terms of available light. The game started just after noon which meant that a portion of the stadium was in shadow. Not only was I sitting in the shadows but the seats immediately across from me (along the first base line) were also much darker when compared to the bright green field. Before taking the panorama, I took a few regular photos and couldn’t get the opposite seats to expose well, even when using the AE/AF lock. It was starting to look like one of the very rare situations where I wasn’t going to get the well-exposed shot that I usually get out of the iPhone.
I decided, for kicks, to make a panorama instead. To my surprise it nailed the difficult lighting of the scene perfectly and I ended up with an evenly exposed shot. The only downside to the resulting photo is that the software didn’t quite stitch together the stadium correctly. You might notice that the roofline above first base is a bit jagged. However, considering I have not edited this photo in any way and it took only a matter of seconds to capture and no wait time to process, I’m impressed. Sure, I could have taken a dozen individual shots and then spent an hour stitching them together by hand on my desktop computer at home but I’m not convinced that I would have ended up with something better.
Click on the downsized version below to see the full 11 MB photo:
