One of the ways to get better quality from a smartphone camera is to create an image using panoramic stitching software. And you can of course shoot the images to create any shaped image you want and as you see above I've ended up with an image that's very similar to 3:2 or 4:3. Below are the six images I used to create the final picture. Shot with my Samsung K Zoom smartphone near the telephoto end of the zoom.
I first started doing this with smaller sensor cameras and sensors that had fewer MP's than they do these days, to create larger higher quality images to sell via my stock library sites. The one above, after stitching, editing, cropping and downsizing ended up at about 30MP. The Samsung shoots 20MP images, which are certainly big enough to stand alone, but the zoom isn't at it's greatest when extended quality wise and Sansung do throw a lot of noise reduction at the jpg. only files the camera creates. So using this procedure, which incidentally took only a couple of minutes using PTGui, improves the sharpness and resolution of the image and makes my smartphone camera 'punch above it's weight.'
I wrote about this a few days ago with regard to m4/3 in a previous post and I'm always surprised that more people who shoot the kind of pictures I do don't use this technique more often. If you are a landscape, architecture or travel photographer this is a pretty simple way to achieve very high resolution, very sharp files using pretty simple and basic gear. In fact I often do this with cameras such as my Blackberry Q10 and iPod touch. The only thing that has to be remembered is to make sure that the images are exposed the same. You do need to have the focus the same as well, but with small sensor smartphones and the lenses they use that isn't really a problem, since pretty much all of of the image is always in focus anyway. Now not all smartphone cameras have some way of locking exposure, but most of my smartphone cameras do. The exception is the Blackberry, but then that is a very good camera for exposure and colour and despite having no manual control whatsoever, it somehow seems to produce a consistent set of images.
Now it's not hard to see the benefits of this. For me, it's a case of working with something small, light and convenient to create the kind of quality images I sell. I have no need to go out and get a 50MP Canon or a 42MP Sony to create monster files capable of large scale reproduction. Obviously if I was shooting moving subjects that would be different, but for the most part I'm shooting images like above. I know a lot of stock and landscape photographers who do a lot of this, but I rarely see examples of it on the photographic internet. It's simple enough and the software these days is quick and efficient. I use PTGui as mentioned above or Photomerge which is in Photoshop and both do a great job. It's very rare for these apps. to get an image wrong and if they do it's usually because I haven't shot a big enough overlap.
Finally however it is worth me mentioning that this works better by avoiding the wider end of a zoom or indeed wide angle lenses. For example I never use my Nokia Lumia 1020 with it's 25mm equivalent lens or my Samsung CM1. My iPod touch and Blackberry are less wide so work better. The problem is that the software has to correct the distortion and that doesn't always produce great results. In fact the best results are achieved by using as close as you can get to a 'standard' focal length and longer and also by not standing to close to what you want to photograph. Below is another image created from 11 shots and as you can see there are no problems with distortion or perspective.
So a relatively simple way to create high resolution images from what might be regarded as low resolution cameras. I would say that I've shot many 1000's of images like this and a day doesn't go by without several of them selling. As I said this doesn't seem to get used that much (or at least written about) and if you have never tried it you may well be surprised at just what your phone or small sensor camera can produce. It doesn't take long to get used to shooting in the 'right way' to make the stitching flawless and certainly the results are usually impressive. And it's worth remembering that this is exactly what NASA use for their Mars Rover camera, which is a small sensor, low MP count camera, because of the weight and size constraints in getting this to another planet, but for which multi image stitching works very well. Because after all, there's apparently nothing moving on Mars. (Well at least we hope it's not!!)