Along the River During the Qingming Festival (清明上河圖) is a 12th-century classic Chinese painting depicting the imperial capital on a particularly busy day. Painted on a long scroll, the “panorama” is too wide to be appreciated in its entirity. The viewers are invited to view only a small section of the painting at the time and immerse themselves in the details.
I have been interested in duplicating this effect with photography. With iPhone’s camera app, I figured that the easiest way to do it is to turn on the panorama mode on a moving train, and let the computer figure out how to generate a static image from the changing scene. This idea proved to be a lot more difficult than anticipated because the programmers obviously did not design the app to be used this way. I eventually realized that when the train approaches a station, the speed is slow enough and steady enough for the program. The following is one example. The quality is not the best but it more or less achieved what I had in mind. (This post was originally written around the time when iPhone 5 just became available. I’m sure that the iPhone is a lot more powerful now.)
I was obsessed with panorama for a while, but the novelty eventually wore off. Here are some of the photos I took around that time.
The above was from a small record store in Tokyo. The entire store is devoted to only one band — The Beatles.
