Diary of a Disordered Mind

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In real life I am Tom Ward
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July 23, 2009

Panoman - The Symbian Autostitch

As you can probably tell from this and recent posts, I'm trying to convince myself that there's no need to buy an iPhone because my N95 can do the same cool things without the draw-backs of crappy camera, lack of MMS etc.

I'm in no way convinced! The iPhone is, quite frankly, an amazing device and when I upgrade in about 12 months time, I'll definitely be persuading O2 (or at least trying) that they want to give me a free one. In the meantime, I've been hunting for iPhone-like apps to keep me going.

One of the coolest photography apps I've seen on the iPhone recently was Autostitch, which creates panoramic images by, as the name suggests, automatically stitching images together. Leo Laporte's posterous blog has demonstrated how amazing the software is and I was, frankly, jealous!

However, a couple of quick google searches came up with the Panoman app, a neat image autostitcher that has very similar functionality to Autostitch. Panoman is Symbian only (as far as I can see; the company that developed it doesn't seem to have a webpage) and allows you to automatically take up to 12 images, balances the focus, exposure and colour, before stitching it all together and posting it to (at least in the N95's case) gallery.

I took a quick photo of our lab as a test of the software and it looks pretty good! The image is 6 photos stitched together rather than the full 12, which would probably have covered a full 360˚.

As I say, I couldn't find the company website, but if you're interested, I got the download link through this blog which has better instructions on how the software works.

Enjoy!

Filed under // iPhone N95 panoman photography s60 symbian

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March 24, 2009

BBC NEWS | Call to 'shut down' Street View

via news.bbc.co.uk

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Street View. When Street View launched in the UK last week my lab and I spent an afternoon looking for our houses and the houses of famous people, friends and family. It's a fun little exercise that got old rather quickly. Then news stories emerged, as they tend to do, of comedic images that were subsequently pulled, mostly due to embarrassment caused to those in the image. That's fair enough; you should be able to control how your image is used if it was taken without your consent. During our afternoon messing around with Street View, we noticed that most (if not all) of car number plates were obscured as were some faces. Again, as people gave no prior consent, I think it was fitting that google saw fit to prevent the exploitation of people in those images. I was, however, slightly confused when I saw the above image. Why have google seen fit to blur out faces on bill-boards? Surely those people gave their consent for their likeness to be used in advertising, which it has. Moreover, the advertisers are hitting a much larger audience with what is essentially advertising in google maps for free.

Personally, I couldn't care less if my image was featured. In fact, I'd be more pissed off if my image was pulled rather than included; I quite like being part of these tools in a slightly geeky kinda way! On a lore serious note,the tool seems to me like a great idea if you were, for example, using it on a mobile phone to orientate yourself in a foreign city. Otherwise, I don't know what all the fuss is about.

Filed under // internet news photography

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March 20, 2009