When Pano was on sale for 10¢ on Google Play, I bought it on a whim. It seemed like it was easier to create panoramas than setting manual exposure on my SLR, taking a bunch of photos, and then stiching them together on the computer with Hugin. With Pano, at least it did some automatic detection and stitching for me, even though I was restricted to a 1D view.

Then Android added functionality to create panoramas by panning your phone, which was great because that was even easier than Pano! I tried it a couple of times but was sorely disappointed because the resolution on the panoramas were horrible! I ended up continuing to use Pano for my on-the-go panoramas.

Then Jellybean (Android 4.2) added Photosphere functionality – which was supposed to be even better panorama capability. I didn’t really get it, because panoramas don’t look right if you take photos of an entire sphere around you. Eventually I got around to trying it, and I guess the “sphere” part is just meant to be catchy. You’re only supposed to take a concave section of the sphere around you.

I’ve tried making a few photospheres now, and it works fairly well given the expected constraints (if your scene keeps changing, such as if there is traffic in front of you, it won’t work well!). The above is a photosphere of Times Square while below is a photosphere of the basilique at St Joseph’s Oratory.

The good thing about the ability to take photospheres is that helps with the limited wide angle ability of the lens on a cellphone. If you can’t step back, you can at least try making a panorama!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, photography