Fun With A Camera Phone

the_local_echo and I were in London today to see Sara Thomas, our electrologist, for some hair zappery and gossip. A splendid time was had.

Afterwards we tubed to South Kensington to visit that wonderful bit of Victorian excess, the Natural History Museum. I hadn't been there since I was a small child, and I'm sure the Diplodocus was much bigger back then. I digress, however - it's a very photogenic place, and one of the advantages of having a nice shiny phone with an 800MHz processor is that it can do clever things like create stitched panoramas, and be fast enough that it does it before the battery is flat, thus:
( Cut for image )

I haven't cropped the edges because I think the panorama stitching, which gives it a curvy lumpy edge, is kinda cool. I made the image by taking 6 photos, carefully rotating the camera around the lens between each one, and then just throwing them at a pano-stitcher application, which runs on the phone and which I downloaded from iTunes. A few seconds later I had my nice wide-angle shot. The reason some of the people look like ghosts is because they are in bits of the image which occur in two overlapping frames, and they moved, and the stitching software seems to average the pixels in overlapping areas (this is why it's important to rotate about the lens, otherwise you get duplicate edges on walls and such, which looks like camera shake).

And then it occurred to me that this made the picture look better, because they look like ghosts, and the Diplodocus is also a ghost, of a kind.

Anyway, I think it's really nice what one can do with a mobile phone these days.

Then we had tea in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was really civilised, and then we walked to Hyde Park, where I climbed trees, because I am twelve.

Now we're having a beer in St Pancras Station, and all is well with the world.

Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/210351.html - you can comment here or there.