boston montreal boston review post 3: cameras

[totient]

miss_chance and I took cameras on our trip, of course, since it was going to be so scenic. But we went a little overboard. We each took a point-and-shoot, and we also each had cameras in our phones, and there was at least one other device with a camera in it along for the ride for a total of I think five. Taking both point and shoots was silly, especially since mine isn't waterproof.

But what made bringing all of these cameras really silly was that none of them had any wide enough angle lenses available. The vistas, especially in Vermont, just don't fit in what you can have on a cell phone -- and the widest angle on the point and shoots was about the same. To really take art shots, we'd have needed much more serious equipment than we were carrying.

I haven't gone and looked at the phone shots to see if, exposure-wise, I'd have been happy with just that. The camera on the Droid is pretty decent for a cell phone camera, and I'm not going to be showing or probably even printing out any of my shots. As a reminder of the beauty we saw I imagine it will more than suffice. Even if I have to look at several shots next to each other on my screen.

Comments

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

The next time you encounter a nice vista, something to keep in mind is that there are programs that will assemble a group of photos in to a panoramic pictures.

There's a nice freeware program called "Autostitch" for Windows that can do it.
http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~brown/autostitch/autostitch.html
(The source for Autostitch is also used in a bunch of commercial apps)

Camera Review

[dhs.livejournal.com]

persis bought me a very nice Panasonic DMC-Z51 point & shoot for my birthday. While the (12x optical) zoom probably doesn't go wide enough for what you want, it does have a nifty "Panorama Assist" mode that helps to line up adjacent images.