Friday, February 17, 2006

Forget Megapixels! How about Gigapixels?


Want to see what kinds of images a gigapixel camera might take? Here is an incredibly detailed "photograph" of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. It consists of 196 separate photographs taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera, and then stitched together into one seamless composite. The complete image measures 40,784 x 26,800 pixels in size! When originally posted (in Dec 2003) it was the world's first gigapixel image. Since then there have been other attempts: (1) a 2.5 gigapixel panorama of Delft (an article about this project can be found here), and the Gigapxl project.

Max Lyons, the original gigapixel image creator, is -- apart from his technical prowess (he is the developer of a wonderful stitching program called PTAssembler) -- quite an accomplished photographer, specializing in stitched panoramas. Here is a samping of his beautiful work. Finally, and not to be missed (!), here is a shot of Max standing next to a huge print of his gigapixel Bryce Canyon image (shown at the 2004 Photo Marketing Association Annual Show).

1 comment:

David said...

This is a great idea and allows one to really extend his camera uses.

Questions: How much information is lost in the stitching process? If information is lost, can you be sure that what you see is really what was there? If so, how much is part of the actual scene? Whatever the answers are, the pictures are still gorgeous.

I like your blog by the way and enjoy reading your postings. Very well done, informative, interesting, and aestetically appealing.

Keep posting and linking. It's great!