On our Italy trip, I purchased a new iPhone 3Gs. I love it! The camera is much better - with a new autofocus system and the video is down right acceptable! It's faster overall too. Lot's of little tweaks. One of my favorite apps for any iPhone is Pano. With it you take as many photos as you want and it automatically stitches them together. It's really easy and a ton of fun! It works best on farther away subjects where the edges of the scene are less prone to distort when you pan from shot to shot. As you know, when subjects are closer, the distortion with a semi-wide lens becomes very apparent. Even so, when I played with it in very close quarters (like in the sunflower field) the seams were noticeable, but still it created a great image that gives a better feel for what being in that environment felt like. This is why I like the panos.

On this trip, I tried to look at things a bit different than on past trips. I typically would use my 70-200mm lens quite a bit. I do love that lens. I brought it with me, as usual, but I rarely used it. Most images I took were with my 12-24mm or the 50mm f1.4. Oh, and the iPhone :-) I also used my Lensbaby and my video cameras. I wanted to force myself to look at things a little different. This was our 5th trip to Italy and it's still just as beautiful as ever.

I'll post images from my regular camera later today or tomorrow, but here's the iPhone panos. Click the image below to see the gallery of others.

Click the image to see the gallery of other iPhone panos