Twin Peaks iPhone Panorama

I went up to Twin Peaks in San Francisco with Jay a few weeks ago. It was a nice view but kind of a worst-case scenario for a photo: my iPhone camera (VGA), poor lighting as the sun was setting, and stong winds.

That day I took a bunch of overlapping shots with my phone. Then I used the GIMP's automatic white balance correction on each of them. Next I stitched them together with Hugin, and finally I edited the stitched image with the GIMP. The following mediocre image is the result (click for the full 1534x652 image):

panorama

The 1 megapixel result really wasn't worth the time. Even in the thumbnail, it's easy to see that multiple source images are contributing their different colors and brightness levels. Maybe Hugin could correct for more of this with the proper settings, but I haven't taken the time to learn it well enough to know how. Although mine has a slightly larger angle, I think the one on wikipedia still wins.

I also took this suprising shot:

slanted Golden Gate bridge

It turns out the iPhone's cheap camera scans horizontally from top to bottom. As I was in a car moving left, the lines lower on the image were scanned later and appear shifted to the right. Jeffrey Erlich has an awesome album that makes use of this effect.