One of the reasons I rarely do panoramas isI just never think of them. Another is that they are easy to do, but hard to do well. A third is that more than 98-99% of my images are viewed only on computers, which is a less than ideal way to see a panorama.

Yesterday when I was at Coney Island I remembered that my Fuji x100 has a simple Panoramic image option. So just remembering that overcame the first obstacle. The Fuji’s built-in capabilities mostly overcame the second (more on that in a bit). That leaves the third problem, which I cannot fix. But if you click on the image you will open up a window to the image on its SmugMug page: move your cursor over the right side of the image and a fly-over menu will come up letting you view it in larger sizes.

As for the Fuji’s panorama feature, it is very easy to use but I have found the results to be a bit spotty. I probably should reread the manual on this point to see if I’m moving the camera wrong. The idea is very simple. After you invoke the panorama mode, you point the camera at the left end of your scene, press the shutter, and start slowly turning the camera to the right. A progress bar shows your, progress, and when it reaches the end you can stop. The camera basically takes a bunch of stills along the way and stitches them together. This is where things get spotty. I took a bunch from the boardwalk and found that some of the stitching did not align things properly. It especially seems to have trouble if there is any motion in the image. I do remember this being discussed in the manual (btw, the manual is at work and I’m at home while I’m writing this which is why I just don’t reread it now). So any time somebody walked through my panorama scan, the image sends up really wonky, but the problems were not limited to such causes.

This one came out nice, taken from the NY Aquarium, Surf Avenue 8th Street subway platform. Fortunately I realized yesterday that I could easily add two stations to my subway platform series while I was out there and I took advantage of the opportunity.