Dec 20, 2009
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the process of creating multiple exposure panorama images. You mount a camera on a tripod, start on one side of your subject, make an exposure, move the camera slightly to the side, make another exposure, and repeat until you’ve captured the entire image. You then bring the images into the computer and merge them together using Photoshop or some other pano stitching software. Your finished product will be a very nice, high-resolution panoramic image of your subject.
Now let’s take this process to a whole other level. Have you heard of GigaPixel Panoramas? The process is similar to before but now you mount your camera in a motorized head that not only moves the camera left to right but also up and down. You can set the equipment up to take a specified number of images across and down in an overlapping grid pattern. Because of the high volume and resolution of the images, a laptop is used as the storage device instead of memory cards. Specialized software and some major computing power then merge all of the images into a gigantic GigaPixel image.A German company by the name of A.F.B. Media just set the world record for creating the largest GigaPixel Panorama image. They used a Canon 5D Mark II with a 400mm f5.6 lens mounted to a Rodeon motorized head from a German company called Dr. Clauss. The setup took 172 minutes to shoot 1,655 full frame 21.4MP images and store the 100GBs of data directly to a laptop. The images were then brought in to a specially built computer using dual Xeon processors with 16 cores, 48GB of RAM and a 4.5TB hard disk needed for the 100 hours of working time. An additional 94 hours were needed for the stitching process but once completed they had a 61GB photo that measured 297,500 pixels wide x 97,500 pixels high. This is the largest known photo
in the world.
You have to see this, it’s absolutely amazing. They have an interactive image on their website that lets you move around and zoom in on sections to see the incredible detail. Also check out the YouTube video below that shows the behind the scenes process they went through.
If you’d like to try a GigaPixel project yourself, there’s a company called GigaPan at GigaPan.org that sells the motorized heads and stitching software. They also have an entire online community dedicated to GigaPixel images where you can explore what other people have created and even upload and share your own. If you do, send me a link I’d love to see it.
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Founder of Current Photographer, co-host of The Digital Photography Cafe Show, Designer, Photographer, and overall tech geek.
Very cool! If you like huge composited images, also check out photoynth and DeepZoom from Microsoft. Photosynth gives you a way to navigate around a composite image in 3D space, and uses DeepZoom within it. DeepZoom itself is part of Silverlight and makes it easy to explore pics through a browser – no matter their size. In otherwords, a 100GB pic can be viewed as easy as 50kb pic over the internet – amazing.
Hey John, I’ve checked out Photosynth in the past and it’s a very impressive technology. The DeepZoom is amazing and works very smooth compared to some other methods that I’ve seen.
Thanks for reading and commenting!