Photo Friday: Panorama Shots

I’ve got a terrific new toy, the Olympus Stylus Tough-8000. It’s a 12mp pocket camera, a little tiny thing that, well, it fits in my pocket. I haven’t ditched Nikon D200 SLR by any means, but this little baby does some stuff that my Nikon won’t. It shoots video and, more importantly, goes underwater. I’ve got just enough time to learn how to use it properly — I’m off to Hawaii and look out, fish, I am taking your pictures, I don’t care if you have a mouth full of coral or look lumpy in that swimsuit, you are ending up on Flickr.

This handy little gadget arrived at my house just yesterday — I tore into the packaging, turned off the annoying confirmation sounds and set right to using it for things my SLR doesn’t do. I shot a couple of minutes of perfectly terrible video and then, went nutty with the panorama mode.

My first impressions of the camera are very favorable, though I’m already up against a few limitations. The battery life seems too short, though I may not have charged it up to full before making it work so hard. The memory cards are proprietary — that annoys me, I would like it so much better if this camera used the same standard SD cards that my husband’s excellent Panasonic Lumix uses. The optical zoom is only 3x — not quite as much as I’d like.

But. The menus are super easy to navigate. The camera is tiny and light and supposedly, I’ll find out, super tough for a clumsy, hard on her gear person like me. And I am crazy, just crazy about the panorama mode. It’s wildly imperfect if you move the camera too fast, or maybe if the light is a little low, and I love the accidental, less than perfect results. I love the wierd stitching between images, the dreamy sense of turning your head in a blurry, messy, way. I shot a handful of these in the Moonlight, an excellent Vietnamese restaurant here in Seattle — and I headed out into the fog early yesterday morning to shoot the image above, looking down my street. Click through, they’re more fun at full size, grainy and a little bit drunk, almost.

I realize that these are wildly imperfect photos, but at times, I think that imperfect photos offer a better sense of place than a beautifully presented image. I like the way these are a little dizzying, a little like they’re in motion. So far, Olympus, so good, and readers, you’ll be seeing more of these.

Added to Delicious Baby’s Photo Friday. And a note — the camera links are Amazon affiliate links. You shop, I get a little kickback. If you’re inspired to buy, please click through, it costs you nothing.