Category Archives: Panorama

Yesterday I posted some pictures from our New York City trip and implied there was a story. It’s really not much of one, but since I dropped the hint, I should tie up the loose end.

We had gotten back to our apartment fairly late after a full day, but with a big chunk of the day sitting (a Broadway play) I was somehow still short on the daily goal for steps on my nagging, step-counting watch. I needed to get in another half-mile or so, so I went out for a late evening stroll.

Figuring I could kill two birds with one stone, I headed toward an ATM machine at the nearest branch for our bank. I of course had my camera with me. After getting my cash supply replenished, I still felt like walking a bit more, so I wandered for a bit. (I was around 57th and Broadway in Manhattan, near Central Park.)

In the course of that, I decided to try some long-exposure photography to catch the streaks of the traffic passing by. It’s not unlike some of the playing around I’ve done with long-exposures and Christmas lights. After some experimentation, I figured out which exposures would be long enough to show what I wanted without being so long that it completely saturated the picture. As I walked and then headed back to the apartment, I took a handful of pictures at each corner where I ended up waiting for the light to turn.

The three I shared yesterday were some of the better ones. I liked them.

Today I’ve finally finished sorting and copying the pictures off of the second camera. Four more to go, but the two that were used the most (my Canon Rebel XT DSLR with the 18-55mm “normal” lens and my iPhone 6+ cell phone) are now done. With luck I’ll get the rest of them done tomorrow.

In the meantime, here’s an example of what happens when the iPhone is in “panorama” mode and you think that it’s in “photo” mode. You take your picture, lower your arm, move on with your life, but for the next few seconds the iPhone is still trying to create a panoramic picture. It does the best it can to make sense of what you’re showing it. The results can be “interesting.”

Remember when The Long-Suffering Wife and I went to New York City in August and I posted daily “teaser” panoramas (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here?

Remember how I’ve ranted about how digital photography makes it much easier for any idiot (i.e., me) to take good pictures because you just take hundreds and hundreds and statistically it’s very likely that one or two will suck less than the norm?

Remember how I kept saying while I was in New York that I would be sharing lots of those pictures?

Well, I will be. Soon.

The big problem with operating this way is keeping track of all of those digital pictures and then sorting through them to see WHICH ones suck less than the norm.

I finally finished getting all of the pictures downloaded and organized from one of the five (six?) cameras that I was carrying.

I hope that it won’t take another ten to twelve weeks to get the images downloaded and organized from the rest of them.

What I really need is a really good AI program to do all of the grunt work. Or I need to clone myself. Or I need to clone myself into an AI program! Or two. Or three.

Think of the possibilities!