"Dream Team" to Create Gigapixel Photo System

neutron_p writes "An eclectic group of artists and scientists that organizers have dubbed the "dream team" of imaging and visualization are gathered at New York University this week to begin to create a photographic system capable of capturing and displaying a gigapixel of visual information in a single image. The first Big Picture Summit, Dec. 8 and 9, is organized by artist-photographer Clifford Ross. Ross says his goal is to bring closer to reality his desire to create a "you are there" photographic experience for those who have not personally witnessed the sublime beauty of natural scenes such as Mt. Sopris in Colorado."

Comments

Re:Large Format film cameras

[grahamsz]

People do seem to loose sight of the "best technology for the job".

We just dont have anything that can capture 3 gigabytes of data in hundredth of a second... doing the equivilent with film is so easy.

However working with 100 mpixel scans in photoshop is way too painful for me... i think i need to get a 4x5 enlarger.

Re:Enough resolution, not enough depth

[eln]

Yah, but the higher the resolution of the image, the bigger you can blow it up without losing (human perceptible) image quality. This is the real advantage of super hi-res imagery.

Pixel count is not the only important thing

[Rolman]

There are several techniques that could be used to achieve such pixel count with current technology, so it doesn't really sound that interesting. It might be good to create a large, hi-res poster with a beautiful landscape. It's also nice that they want the massive datasets to be processed and stored in about 1/15th of a second, making it a lot more useable for artistic purposes.

But film still surpasses those qualities and not only because of resolution and speed, but color. What I'd be interested in is to have digital photography that goes beyond the current 24-bit depth (if only for internal computations and not actual output) and implements better CCD technology to compensate for its inherent problems with lighting.

I know there are advances in those areas, but unfortunately they've been very slow since the market is going for pixel count (MHz, anyone?). Until that trend changes, film will continue to be the better choice, regardless of what any dream team says.

2 reasons:

[temojen]

• Photographic artists tend to be highly technical.
• If you're going to have to hand develop an 8x10 photographic plate, then scan it on a unique, hand built drum scanner and post-process it on a supercomputer, the first question should be is this scene worth 4gigapixels?, and the second question should be is the lighting right?

That's too many (really!)

[Duncan3]

OK, a quick look here for some hard numbers: Count and density of human retinal photoreceptors.

Shows only about 60 Million net receptors (rods+cones) in the human eye. Only 1/20 is for color, and almost none are for blue. So unless it's gonna be printed on the side of a building (which you view from far away) you only need a few megapixels for your little 4x5" prints.

Of course, that wont stop anyone...

Re:Why artists?

[gstoddart]

Sounds like a technical question to me and the last thing you want when solving technical problems is an artist saying 'well yes, that's all very nice, but we think it should be pink'.

No no no. You're confusing marketing with artists.

Artists recognize there needs to be a practical way to make it pink, and can actually listen when you say "God, imagine trying to use a 10-foot wide brush".

The artists want it pink for a reason and are willing to discuss how to make it go.

All marketing knows is that a customer once said pink would be optimal; and they're purely basing it off that fact.

And, the good thing about the artist, once they realize it isn't pink, they don't keep distributing glossies to the customer saying it's pink.

All true but you miss the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you miss the point of a gigapixel image. It's NOT to make a really sharp poster size print. It's to make an image that you can interact with a bit like you can interact with the real world. For example can move around and see different parts of it or you stand way back and see it as a panoramma or get close and see an insect on a flower.

In "normal" photography the photographer "edits the world by selecting some small portion of it. A multi-gigapixel image just capures _everything_ and lets the view do the editing and exploring.

The chalange is finding a way to display the image data.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[phoenix321]

Photographers using traditional film have argued exactly the same for almost five years now and digital photography took off anyway.

Digital technology becomes cheaper every month, no matter what piece of equipment we're talking about - except digicams just before xmas of course - so at one point we might have gigapixel cameras in the consumer price range, who knows.

I must apologize for washing your detailed and insightful post away, but I think you have a narrow viewpoint from an elitist photographer's perspective. An incredibly old-school one at that, sorry to be so blunt. Analog cameras have intrinsic drawbacks that cannot be overcome and which are the reason for the digicam craze. I agree to you that digital photography is not the most efficient and not the cheapest way to do hoch resolution imaging at the moment. But Moore's Law will ensure it is in the future.

Advantages of a high-resolution digital imaging system, from an outsider's viewpoint not married to celluloid and chemicals:

- digital images can be previewed extremely fast. If a shot was wrong, retry without waste.
- digital images can be sent via networks around the globe extremely fast. Newscasts, distributed expert teams, peer review, you name it.
- digital images can be ported to any viewing equipment, instantly. Cinema-like projection equipment, large scale video walls, large printers, details on small handouts and laptop screens
- archival without color degradation
- catalogues are generated in an instant
- easy whitebalance, even after the shooting
- automatic recording of timestamps and used equipment, shutter times etc.

Sorry for bringing up the "dinosaur"-argument, but sooner or later analog photography will die and there's nothing you can do about it. For consumer cameras, analog's nearly dead and photo studios are following now, leading digital photos slowly but steadily up the quality/picture size ladder. You are not alone, as there are many audiophile vinyl and radio tube enthusiasts out there, that simply refuse to acknowlegde digital technology and its advantages.

To mimic your "sum up":

-Large-format cameras may be easier and cheaper, but prone to human error, slower and horribly unflexible in image presentation.
-A print may be the best way to judge image quality, but in case of a 10x10m image, it can take you days if not weeks to get it on paper.

A projected or backlighted image certainly is a thousand times more enticing and "real" to the viewer's eyes. Paper images are lacking vivid colors and real appearance in my opinion and there's no studio light full-spectrum or bright enough to concinve me otherwise. A paper photograph may induce different emotions or a more distand point of view, that's why black&white imaging is so intense - but paper is no accurate representation of reality and it's going the way of portrait oil painting soon, I think. More artsy, less real. Real viewing is luminous, paper is not.