Mobile Photography

I like taking photos, especially since these days you can have a decent camera at hand all the time. It might be because there’s a scene with a nice combination of colors, other times it might be a chance to do a mini-benchmark for a new phone camera/software feature. So, here are some of my photos that I’ve found interesting for some reason or just looking really nice.

They were all taken with a mobile phone, the most recent ones with a Nexus 5, others with a Nexus 4 or the Galaxy Nexus. I’ll point out if the image was post-processed in any way or taken with the older Nexii.

A beautiful winter view from my workplace A beautiful winter view from my workplace I really like Google Auto-Awesome’s panorama stitching, it allows you to take full resolution, HDR shots and then stitches them for you automatically. But, often I find that it does a relatively poor job at balancing the exposure, which should not be that hard of a job since it does the stitching in a offline stage where it can look at all the photos making a panorama upfront and has useful EXIF exposure data in every photo…

BMW Dealership Munich BMW Dealership in Munich This is a nice example of Google’s “vertical stitching”. The image was made by taking two rows of landscape photos which were then automatically stitched to produce this relatively tall panorama. Very nice results for a photo taken with a mobile phone that has a “disappointing” camera (as online reviews always say for Nexus phones)…

Deutsches Museum Panorama Deutsches Museum Panorama Another example of how nice Auto-Awesome photos can turn out. There are a couple of stitching errors if you go looking for them, but nothing noticeable enough to spoil the image. The person closer to the center actually appeared on two shots in completely different poses and was successfully removed and merged into the final shot without producing any visible artifacts. How awesome are computer algorithms? :)

A wide shot covering most of north-west Zagreb A wide shot covering most of north-west Zagreb This one is a more recent shot, done after Google’s March 2014. update to Google+. The exposure balancing is much better now, there are no visibile brightness differences in individual stitched images, giving the panorama a much better, seamless look. The only downside is that artifacts apear on those images whose exposure needed to be drastically changed. Here, you might see blue-ish tint and some compression artifacts on the leftmost part of the panorama (the very edge actually), since the first image had the lowest exposure and needed to be boosted the most. An interesting thing about this shot is that it was taken from two different windows in two different rooms of an apartment and there’s no way of telling that by just looking at the image :)

Taken after a rainy day, from the offices of PhotoPay.