Fujifilm X100 – Panorama Feature in Brazil on Ipanema & Copacabana beaches

Yep, one of the most amazing beaches in the world where there is in a major city. This is the attractive of the city of Rio de Janeiro. So why not use the panorama feature on the Fujifilm X100 and put it through it’s paces.

Public Service Anoucement

Firstly I’d like to mention transportation in Rio – be prepared! While taking public transport  is pretty much putting your life in the hands of a Saturday joyrider. Although it is exhilarating there were times when  I voluntarily closed my eyes in sheer fear, not a easy feat for me. Nonetheless if you wish your heart to race a little faster, I can thoroughly recommend a ride on public bus in Rio. There is nothing like it!  The locals call it, ‘Driving with emotion!’

Real World Test of the Panorama Feature

So back on to the beaches of Rio, Ipanema and Copacabana. I used a circular polarizer to deepen the blue in the sky as much as possible. This was in bright sunlight, not something I do much but I’m on holidays. This is a real world test of the panorama feature of the camera. The camera has two angles in the pano mode: 120˚ and 180˚. I found the 180˚ mode too wide and difficult to get an accurate shot. If you want to do serious panorama I would recommend getting up early for a start (note to self on that one!) and using a panorama head – see my posts on this – /tips/panorama/

Tip: Make a couple of attempts, at least three panos and checking the result afterwards is absolutely essential. Ensure to zoom into the image, as I found stitching not to work very well at all some of the time. In fact the camera’s stitching basically sucks.

Having made many panoramas with the feature, I got some decent results until I got to Copacabana beach, this where the pano really messed up completely.

Stitching on the X100

Looking at the pano below you can see how the horizon messed up completely after many attempts.

Getting fed up with the results. I decided to shot a normal 3:4 images and crop it later.

Panorama are JPEGs!

I was shooting in RAW + JPEG mode on the camera with 90Mb/s Sandisk card which proved to operate perfectly. However one thing that really annoyed me apart from the poor stitching was the that individual shots were not recorded on the SD card but just an 8Mp Jpeg panorama image. If I had the individual RAW files at least I could try and fix the stitching later back at the computer.

Basically the panorama feature on the X100 is a mere gimmick, in fact my iPhone 5 made a better and higher resolution panorama images than the X100.  So the panorama feature is pretty much useless or at the very most a novelty.  I wouldn’t bother with it. Better to make individual images preferably of course with a panorama head and tripod – when possible.

Another Pano attempt which worked well in low light at ISO 800.

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