I don’t usually publish other people’s photos in my articles on this site but today I’m making an exception. Self-professed nature geek, Kait Wilson, is a wildlife biologist and consultant from Canada’s Yukon territory, and I’m a lucky man to be able to call her my partner in life. After returning from a recent trip to the Yukon’s North Slope, well inside Canada’s Arctic Circle, she sat down with me to show me the photos that she’d taken with her iPhone. The vastness of an untouched landscape like the Arctic is a difficult thing to capture in a single photo, but I was immediately struck by the beauty of the panoramic photos that she had captured.
Panoramic photography with a DSLR is quite an involved process compared with taking a single shot. To do it properly you have to use a tripod and maybe even a nodal slide to make sure you rotate around the optical centre of the lens. Even once you’ve taken the time to do that, you still have to stitch the photos together in software like Lightroom or Photoshop. There’s no getting around the fact that there’s a barrier to entry for DSLR panoramas that potentially involves more money, and definitely involves more time. For these reasons it’s not a technique that a lot of people bother with, even though it can sometimes offer a perspective that’s just not possible any other way. Many of my panorama attempts remain unstitched in my Lightroom catalog many years after I’ve taken them – I’m sure some of you can relate to that!
Mobile phone photography has come on in leaps and bounds in the last decade, both in terms of camera sensor technology, and computational power. Using the panoramic shooting mode of your mobile device is brilliant demonstration of this and it takes away that barrier to entry, allowing you to capture accurately stitched panoramic images in just a few seconds. Even better, these panoramas have a huge resolution compared to a single image from your phone. Current-at-time-of-writing iPhones are able to capture up to 38 megapixels, which would easily print up to 6ft long!
As soon as I saw these wonderful photos from Kaitlin’s trip, I knew I had to share them with all of you because they are a great reminder of the power that’s in your pocket, and also great examples of the kinds of scenes that work so well for this type of photography. I know I’ll be thinking about capturing more photos like this on my next trip after seeing these.
Thanks for letting me share the photos with everyone Kait 😀
I, too, have fallen in love with the panorama mode, on my Samsung Galaxy S8. Taking panorama shots has never been easier…and fun! Kait’s photos are beautiful.
Ah yes, I haven’t used a Galaxy phone myself but I hear they are just as good at panoramas! And I will pass on your kind words to Kait, thank you 🙂