So you want to show what a beautiful place looks like, but you can't capture the epic grandeur with a regular camera lens, especially your wide-angle smartphone lens. Often this is the job for a panorama picture. Probably the best reason to use your iPhone's native camera app is for the panorama feature. It makes panoramas nearly foolproof.
Panoramas, those wide and shallow pictures, are made by merging several images into one. In the film days, this was literally done by attaching prints together, laboriously trying to align straight edges of objects and keep them looking straight. When digital photography came along, panoramas got much easier with the help of software that could make that wide, shallow picture nearly perfectly. Photoshop, Adobe's flagship pro image editing software, has had a pano-making command for decades.
Smartphone apps try to do the same thing that Photoshop does. The iPhone camera app is my go-to tool for making quick panoramas on a story, like I did today at the Highway 224 landslide. I also use Auto-Stich on the recommendation of my colleague Randy Rasmussen. It lets you shoot pictures to compose a pano from with any camera app, then stitches them together for you. Or you can use the built-in camera in the app.
The trick to successful panoramas is to minimize exaggerated, and crooked, perspectives when you shoot the component images. Avoid extreme wide-angle lenses. That's why Apple wants you to stay on the line. As you pan across the scene, the camera captures multiple images and stitches them in real time. It looks like you are painting the picture into your iPhone as you pan across the scene. It is also finding perspectives that are easiest to stitch by guiding you to not tip the camera while exposing the panorama. One might think that horizonals are best for panoramas, but the vertical shape that Apple requires you to shoot is actually better. The narrower width creates less distortion at the corners that make blending difficult. The taller frame makes it easier to capture more resolution, if you keep your arrow pointed correctly, and has more room to crop irregularities if you don't. Ideally, you want the back of the camera to be as straight as possible, avoid tilting up or down. This creates a keystone shape, making straight things crooked. Pano-making software can sometimes fix this, sometimes not.
Of course, I've made all of these mistakes, which is the subject of today's gallery. They aren't all mistakes, but examples of these pano-shooting concepts from my recent work. The captions will explain the specifics.