For some reason I've got photos on my mind this week.

I wrote about how far we should take digital photo retouching earlier in the week and last night about Autostitch and three inexpensive apps built on it's imaging technology.

On my way to the donut shop this morning (maybe that's the real cause Ed!), I saw a home for sale up ahead that looked like it might be the perfect marriage of the two posts.

Here is what I saw:

From the best vantage point for seeing the entry and landscaping for the home, there is a huge light pole in the way. Of course, I could edit that light pole out, any good Photoshop wiz can. But, as the comment stream in How Far Is Too Far clearly indicates, we shouldn't. So what do you do? Well if you have an ultrawide angle lens like the one on the Kodak v705, you might be able to get a decent photo of the house if you stand to the side of the pole to give yourself more distance from the house. Like this:

But in this case, the tree is in the way of the roof line. So the ultrawide only helps a bit, but not much. You really want to get a view of the walkway up to the house, but if you've just got a standard 35 mm lens, this is what you see if you stand with the telephone pole out of the way.

This is where a program that can stitch both horizontally and vertically can come in handy. You know I love my Kodak v705, and one of the reasons why is that it can stitch right in the camera. But on a sunny day like this, it's sometimes hard to line things up correctly in the display. And even when you can, as I did below, you're still limited to a horizontal plane.

If you don't have the v705 and are using a standard 35 mm lens and typical stitching sotware, you can only stitch horizontally, and here is what you get from the 35mm perspective:

But, if you can stitch both horizontally and vertically, you can get this:

From the same vantage point, we've got the main entry, landscaping, full view of roof line and full view of stairs leading to the house. (You'd probably want to move the cars) And, it was all done automatically, with no tripod and no photo editing. 

How long did this take? Well, I was walking with 5 children, all under age 7, to the donut shop. They really like donuts. How long do you think they gave me to pause on our journey and make these photos? Yeah, about two minutes. :)

To be able to spontaneously do something like this is why I love point and shoot cameras. Mine is almost always with me. And that panorama above is why I'm digging my new stitching software. It's nice to have the right tool in the toolbox when you need it.