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Making the World's Largest Panoramic Photo
Iddo Genuth writes: In order to create the largest panoramic picture ever taken (using commercially available gear), a team of international photographers led by Italian photographer Filippo Blengini had to climb to an altitude of 3500 metres, wait for two weeks in a temperature of minus 10 degrees Celsius, look for a sunny, bright day, and then spend 35 hours shooting. During this time they shot over 70,000 images, which were combined in to the giant 365 Gigapxiel panorama using a special robotic head with a long 400mm telephoto lens (and a 2x Extender).
But the work didn't end up in the snowy Alps — when the team got back they had with them no less than 46TB of images which they needed to process in order to create one giant interactive image, 365 Gigapixels in size. This processing required some very powerful hardware and took over two months to complete, but the result is a look at the Mont Blanc (the tallest mountain in the Alps and the highest peak in Europe outside of the Caucasus range raising 4,810 meters or 15,781 feet above sea level) — like it has never been seen before.
But the work didn't end up in the snowy Alps — when the team got back they had with them no less than 46TB of images which they needed to process in order to create one giant interactive image, 365 Gigapixels in size. This processing required some very powerful hardware and took over two months to complete, but the result is a look at the Mont Blanc (the tallest mountain in the Alps and the highest peak in Europe outside of the Caucasus range raising 4,810 meters or 15,781 feet above sea level) — like it has never been seen before.
The article forgot to mention that the team has hidden a life-size Waldo in the photo. Can you find him?
They didn't do a very good job of stitching the photos together. Much of the detail is repeated. For example, look just down and to the left of the gondola: the snow banks are repeated twice (one set on top and the other set a bit below). Then if you zoom out, you'll realize that much of that section of snow is repeated. Look to the right, in the rougher terrain, and again the same details are repeated in a tiled format. It's like this throughout the "photograph," and you can't tell what's real and what's incorrect.
For a huge image: success. For a huge image that actually shows what's really there: fail.
If you're allowed to take tens of thousands of separate pictures and move the camera with a robotic arm, wouldn't the largest panoramic picture in the world be Google StreetView?
The latest Bond villain secret stronghold.
It's also a surprisingly dull subject. Spectacular to look at zoomed out sure, but the detail one gets to zoom into is mostly just snow and rocks. And they look pretty much the same everywhere. It seems likely that the subject was chosen because it doesn't move around very much, making the stitching job simpler - though as the AC points out, even that didn't go very well. People have been doing this for quite a while now, here's one from 2010 that's alot more interesting to zoom into, even if the in-browser interface is less slick.