iPhone : Great panoramas with Microsoft Photosynth

 Photosynth has been around for a while, as a sort of skunkworks project from some really clever folks at Microsoft.  Photosynth on the PC allows you to do some pretty cool photo tricks and the app has been enhanced to facilitate posting images to Bing as a sort of share your work scenario.  Those are not the things that excited me however.  What is wicked cool is how simple the iPhone app makes the creation of panoramas. Now certainly you can create panoramas with your DSLR both manually or with a glut of obscenely expensive tools.  You could also go with the Gigapan system that programmatically uses servos and information you program in to create incredible panoramic images.  (I like the tech, but not the perpetual license to use your images).

But as I am prone to say, perhaps at the risk of babble, "the best camera is the one you have with you", and I, like many of you, always have my iPhone and with the 4S, the camera is pretty decent.  Photosynth for iPhone does many things but most importantly it makes creating panoramas scary simple.

Launch the app and you follow the process to capture images and then stitch them together.  There are tips sites as well but I found the app so simple and so powerful that I am doing panoramas a lot, certainly not all good, but lots because it is so simple and fun.  Putting the 4S in one of the little cases with a tripod mount and you are set to make some pretty darn nice images.  At the time of this posting, Photosynth is free.  If you have an iPhone, have ever fired up the camera and would like to try making panoramas without getting a solid headache or spending a fortune on added kit, get this app.

5 out of 5