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| Horizon +1 Optical filter, Kodak Tri-X |
At last a quick option to make panorama on the fly with decent resolution. Two years ago I have stopped taking panoramic photos after 10 years of shooting in the streets, with an old Horizon Russian camera and Tri_X film Kodak film. The hassle to develop, scan the negative in compare to the quick results of the digital camera brought me to decide to move to digital cameras. Used the camera to stitch photos mostly of classic landscape but always missed the intuitive quick panoramic street photography, not to mention the time to stitch and wait in front of Photoshop.
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| Sony α NEX-5 16mm, regular Panorama length. Eran Bendheim |
The new Sony α NEX-5 with the sweep photography is compact to carry around (the 16mm pancake lens) in my pocket, with a 16 gig card has over 1400 images to be shot (The battery will surly be drained before that). it give the option of making two length of panorama pictures classic and wider. I am usually shoot from the heap with out looking at the screen and get used to the rhythm of the shot and rotation speed I need to apply, the camera fail the photo if you are turning too quickly. The sweep is very good at stitching non moving objects, cars walking people is facing a fate of being narrowed, duped or sliced in the process. In the old film camera you would get and smear effect in this case since the it is a multiple exposure and not a long scan exposure you get those cut out. I hope that Sony will enable a smart logic similar to face recognition or smile they have now to apply on the sweep option. A quick option might have been to write also the separate images in the card so I would have the option to edit later on if I want, but there is no option like that yet.
I have also tried a wider filter on the 16mm lens not sure how wide it translate to mm ( the wide angle x0.79 I guess it some were around 12.5 mm, with sensor size effective of around 16mm). The panoramic could be wide almost as 360 degree, photos closer to objects with less problems of duplicated in the stitching of moving objects, maybe the overlap is not that narrow as a bigger lens.
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| Sony α NEX-5 16mm, wider Panorama length. Eran Bendheim |
The way I photograph I take the camera errors for now and adopt them if they match the visual and the content, great! Part of the way I view my process is to let the camera process be part of the dynamic in creating the shot, all my photos are in a constantly in a changing environment. The street is always changing and the automatic sweep stitching the camera create is part of the process. The editing at the end will decide in the process if an image is erased or being saved and presented in a series like any regular process I have.
Hope this blog made you more interested in panoramic photography and you are welcome to see my site
www.eran.com with is panoramic classic photos and check out mu
flicker account with new panoramas and more
Thanks Eran Bendheim
The SONY α NEX-5.
