A few of the articles on this website are about making pictures that wrap all around you. The process involves taking a lot of pictures and then using special piece software to make and yet another one to display the result. Microsoft has just simplified the whole process with their Photosynth apps and website. And best of all, it is FREE.

Here's a panorama taken with my phone:

How was it made?

I stood in front of this beautiful church, which happens to be next to my house, and fired up the iPhone Photosynth app. The app guided me to hold the phone vertical and tap the screen, then start turning. Since I had taken panoramas before, I knew that the key to a successful one is holding the camera (my iPhone, in this case) at the same point in space while I moved around it. A good way to achieve this is to find a feature on the ground that you place your camera directly above, so I can see if I'm drifting away from shot to shot.

The app has no trouble matching the pictures as they come, because the images already taken move as I move the phone. As soon as the center of the picture is not in a previous image, a new snapshot is taken. This ensures a 50% overlap between shots, which is plenty for stitching them all together later on. When I've covered the whole image (I usually do a full sphere, including shots straight up and straight down), I hit the finish button and then the program takes a few minutes putting it all together. The finished panorama can be viewed on the iPhone itself, or can be uploaded to Facebook or Photosynth.net (login required, but it's free).

Now, Photosynth has the ability to zoom deeply into interesting parts of the image, which means that a good quality picture, with many megapixels, would work perfect here. You can do this by shooting the pictures with a good camera, using the process I describe in this article, and then stitching them in a computer. For a PC, the software to get is Photosynth, plus the Microsoft Image Composite Editor. Both are free.

I used them both to make a panorama of the inside of the cathedral of Madrid, Spain, using pictures I shot a year ago. The process was completely automatic, and the result is what you see below, comprising 242 megapixels.