Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier

megas writes "Max Lyons has just posted on his site what seems to be the first 1 Gigapixel picture, created from 196 separate photographs taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera, and then stitched together into one seamless composite. According to Max, he has 'been unable to find any record of a higher resolution photographic (i.e. non-scientific) digital image that has been created without resizing a smaller, lower resolution image or using an interpolated image.'"

Comments

Re:My god...

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1gig image isn't there. It's a much smaller, more web friendly preview. The 1gig image is a 2GB TIFF file.

We should at least buy a few poster prints from the guy considering what we are about to do to his server.

Re:Relatively static?

[bobbozzo]

The guy said he needed a subject that was relatively static. But shadows on a canyon wall are not static. He says it took him 13 minutes. I wonder if there was any noticeable movement in the shadows in that time?

The sun moves (about) 180degrees/12hours = 15degrees/hour or about 3 degrees in 12 minutes.

If taken when the angle of the shadows is relatively low (like high noon), I doubt it would be noticeable.
However, it looks like it was taken near sunset or sunrise, in which case the change in length of the shadows would be much more dramatic.

The math is explained here but you'd need to know the height of the canyons plus the angle of the sun or the length of the shadows to get an exact result.

Re:another large image

[PurpleFloyd]

No, it's not stiched, but it's not digital either. That looks like a scanned medium-format (negative size about 6x6 cm) film image. Needless to say, medium-format film can provide lots of resolution - you could probably blow up a good medium-format photo onto a wall and get great detail. The theroretical maximum of medium-format is roughly the same as the image in the article, full size - roughly 1 billion pixels of data (zoom in any farther, and you're looking at film grain, not the recorded image). The interesting thing about the linked article is showing how it's possible to take pictures with incredible resolution, without breaking the bank on a medium-format camera, good lenses, and your own darkroom. All it takes is a good digicam and a willingness to spend hours and hours in PanoramaTools and Photoshop, getting things just right.