iPhone 5

Cassis Restaurant Cirque du Soleil Commercial Window Advertising Photography St Petersburg Florida

in

Last week I began a commercial photography project for Bayprint documenting the printing, installing and displaying of a particular type of print made especially for windows.  When viewed from outside you see a colorful image of a Cirque du Soleil performer.  From inside, it appears as just a light gray shade.  These prints were installed on Cassis, a downtown St. Petersburg restaurant right on Beach Drive, a heavy foot traffic location.  As you can see, they add quite a bit of color to the restaurant's facade!

These comparison before and after shots were taken a few days apart, but I went back at the same time of day to match the light and shadows as much as possible.  I looked at the before photo on my iPhone 5 to help me line up the after shot in the same framing.

On yet another day I went to Cassis to photograph the installation process.  Since I am a person who has trouble putting a small sticker on a car window in any kind of alignment, I had a lot of respect for the guys doing the install working with such large prints.  As most pros do, they made it look easy!

iO6 Panorama Feature on iPhone 5 first photo example St. Petersburg Florida

in

Before I went to bed last Thursday, I set the alarm on my iPhone 4 for 2:55am.  This was not because I have a new paper route or decided to follow in my grandfather's footsteps and be a milkman, but because I want to insure I was able to get one of the first preorders in for the new iPhone 5 that here on the coast would be first available at 3am Friday morning.  So I rumbled out of bed and began refreshing the iPhone 5 page on apple.com.  Another reason to be one of the first was that I had already secured in my buy-back price for my 2-yeard old iPhone 4 on the great site gazelle.com for a whopping $146!  That's right, it basically meant that the new iPhone 5 would only be $54 out of pocket, if I could get one before October 1st.  

Well, my early rising paid off as my iPhone 5 (white, 16GB, AT&T) was delivered on the first available date (Friday the 21st).  It took almost four hours to sync all my backup data to it, so I did not have much opportunity to test the new iOS 6 panorama feature until yesterday (Saturday).  I was walking Kiki around Crescent Lake Park, a common Saturday evening activity and with the wide open views from the lakeside, I had my first chance to test the panorama function.

I saw a video of how it works so I knew you do not take five or six separate shots in a row, but rather turn the panorama feature on and then glide the camera over the area you want to photograph.  There are visual guides to keep your framing on track, and I must admit I was rather wobbly in my first attempt as you can see in the unedited image above.  

Still, there was a large portion of the image that was usable.  I cropped out the left, right and bottom edges and found a decent remaining image.  The exposure was a little off and there was a lot of noise in the sky, but overall I thought the new panorama feature in iOS 6 on first impression seems to be very usable.  I look forward to trying it again with a more steady hand and in different light.  

Have you made any panoramas with iOS 6 yet?  Post your examples in the comments below.