As a follow up to my original post why panorama photography on the iPhone is not quite there yet (and maybe never will) and the review of the ghosting issues in AutoStitch, my recent photoshoot in San Francisco reiterated the point why the iPhone is not a good camera for shooting panoramas (yet).
Panorama of San Francisco Bay, with Yerba Buena Island and Treasure Island in the background. To the right is the Oakland Bay Bridge. This pano was stitched in Photoshop from 5 iPhone images
Here are the issues:
Lack of exposure settings.
Panoramas are typically shot in manual mode. You expose for the lightest part of the image, set the camera to manual mode and then take all images at the same exposure. You cannot set the iPhone camera to manual mode. Instead, every shot gets exposed as you take the shot. Just check out the water in the above pano. You can see which part of what images was used by Photoshop when stitching the pano. While Photoshop’s auto-blending is pretty good, it cannot deal with that much of a difference in exposure settings. To save this image, I could manually blend these image by, among other things, masking certain portions of the images and then applying gradients in Photoshop.
Shutter Lag
You might have to look at the full scale version of this panorama, but when you look at the water in the middle of the panorama you see the wake of a boat. So where is the boat? I took the pano from left to right, whereas the boat moved from right to left. Due to the time it takes for the iPhone camera to be ready to take the next shot (many, many slow seconds), the boat was not in the second from the left exposure yet when I took it, but had left the third (middle) exposure by the time I could take it. This is not an issue with a DSLR, where I crank out all 5 images of this panorama in less than 5 seconds. Of course, I can clone out the wake of the boat in Photoshop…
Tiny Megapixels
I’m not a megapixel junkie and typically like fewer “good” (meaning physically big, especially when shooting raw) megapixels rather than lots of bad (tiny) MPs, but for panos like these, the iPhone 3G’s megapixels are simply not good enough. Given how small the iPhone camera sensor must be, I doubt that the quality would be that much on the iPhone 3GS. Again, check the full scale version of this panorama for the gory details.
I don’t want to necessarily knock the iPhone. The purpose of its camera is to give people a tool with the ability to quickly snap images, maybe edit them a bit and then upload them to social networks or other communities. It is not nor will it ever be a substitute for a DSLR. It’s not designed to give you enough source material to print a 20 inch wide poster. And that is just fine, as long as we keep our expectations in check. If we need more advanced photo capabilities, we should take at least a point & shoot with us. Which is why I never take just the iPhone on a photoshoot.
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