O'Reilly publishes Digital Photography Hacks with hacks for camera phones

O'Reilly has just published Digital Photography Hacks, that includes hacks for camera phones. A sample hack, Hack #82, "Get the Big Picture with a Little Camera Phone" -- about stitching together several camera phone photos to create one larger image -- is posted in a pdf file.

Todd Ogasawara authored the hack. He provides tips for taking photos when creating a panorama as well as providing instructions (see below) for creating the image.

Todd's tips

"* Some digital cameras provide on-screen tools to help you line up stitched images as you're shooting them. Camera phones, however, do not have this feature. You work around this by visually scanning the area you want to photograph and choosing visual segmentation points to help you line up the photographs and create assembly segments.

"The rule of thumb is to overlap each frame by 30%.

"* Camera phones do not have sockets that you can attach to tripods to ensure smooth panning. So, this is hand-holding country. To produce the best results, minimize your body movement when you're photographing each segment.

"I recommend keeping you feet in a single spot throughout the entire process. Twist your waist, while keeping your back as vertical as possible, for horizontal panorama scenes.

"When photographing vertical scenes, try to bend you shoulders and waist straight back (when shooting upwards) or forward (when shooting down). These behaviors minimize segment mismatches that create unusable visual areas.

"* Bring the photo segments into a photo-stitching (sometimes referred to as photo-merging) application. A number of general-purpose, commercial photo-editing applications include photo-stitching tools, such as Photomerge in Photoshop CS and Elements...."

Todd concludes

Todd concludes the hack with, "A bonus of using this technique is that you've also added resolution to your landscape, which enables you to make a bigger print than you'd be able to make of a single 640 x 480 picture.

"You don't have to be limited to small prints or narrowly composed scenes with your camera phone. Just remember to gather all the parts while you're taking the pictures."

The 332-page book sells for $29.95.

Scalado's panorama software

Todd doesn't mention this in his hack, but Scalado (that I've mentioned in this Weblog and during my half-day and day camera phone tutorials) offers PhotoFusion software that include panorama capabilities (see left). PhotoFusion also offers a 4x digital zoom, photo-strips with up to nine small images combined into one image and photo "waping" to create funny images.

PhotoFusion is available for Symbian OS Series 60 and Symbian OS 7.0 UIQ camera phones. It costs $19.95.

Scalado offers a free trial version for unlimited use, but it inserts the company's logo into every photo.

Comments

[roger]

I recently bought an audiovox pm-8920 with Sprint contract that requires using their email service at 15US per month.

any way i can download pics directly to home computer

i am marginally literate in all this---

thanx

roger