42 foot HDR image from a 8 megapixel camera

This is a tale of Pete Carr and his quest to create a 42 foot HDR panoramic image for his client off of his 8 mp camera. Here, we are frequently the bearer of bad news, when we have to educate people on the limitations of their file size. You can learn a lot from Pete's process and what it took to get this file to image at full size. Since Pete was also trying to pull of that HDR look, he had to take triple the shots to overlap them. A total of 33 shots were combined to create the final image. Luckily he was able to use Photoshop CS3's panoramic seaming tool. He then used Genuine Fractals to beef up the resolution. It probably also helped that his client used wallpaper application (which has a lower DPI threshold).

Pete is right, "never say never", he was able to create a beautiful image that sets the perfect ambiance for his client's dining room. Found [Via]

The 42 foot wide Liverpool skyline HDR

You always see people discussing megapixels on forums and what you can print to. People saying they have a 8mp camera and it does A3 nicely. Which is fine for family portraits and things but when a client asks you to produce something 13 meters, 42 feet wide from an 8mp camera you of course say yes. I’ve printed to 1 meter before now without issue. The prints look great. So 13m? Easy. Ok so maybe not easy. You read articles about 50mp Hassleblads with sensors the size of TV’s that people use for advertising, for billboards. You never in your right mind think that you can use a simple mid-range DSLR with only 8mp to produce something 42 feet long and 9 feet high. Never say never though.

Creating your own gigapixel image

Photopreneur is a blog that offers ideas, inspiration, and opportunities for photographers on how to market themselves and inventive ways to generate revenue from their photography. If you have never visited them before, you should check it out. You will be dizzy with ideas and might have several "Why didn't I think of that?" moments after an hour of reading. It is a great resource for photographers.

They had a feature on photographer Max Lyons. He specializes in gigapixel photography. He shot his first gigapixel image in 2003 of Bryce Canyon. Technology has helped speed up the once daunting task of merging the many shots taken to comprise the gigapixel image, he developed a software program called PTAssembler. The post has several tips if you are considering trying to create a gigapixel image of your own.

"The software I’ve created to produce these images (originally written in 2003) has no size constraint. From a purely technical standpoint, it would be a trivial matter to produce images of two, 20 or 200 gigapixels."

Of course, it’s not quite that easy. Max points out that while his program has now cut the time to assemble a one gigapixel mosaic from several weeks to just two hours, most of which is automated, capturing each photo “tile” with a long focal-length lens can take “a considerable amount of time.” It took Max seventeen minutes with a six megapixel Canon D60 to shoot the 196 separate images that went into the Bryce Canyon panorama. That in turn creates problems with movement, changing light and depth of field, and can limit the range of subjects that can be shot using this method:

"In fact, if you look at the works of other high resolution photographers, you’ll see that most really large images (gigapixel and beyond) tend to be either (a) of interior, flat surfaces where depth of field, motion and lighting changes are not such problems, (b) scenes that look OK when viewed at tiny size, but have such a narrow depth of field that most of the image is hopelessly blurry when viewed at full size and/or (c) suffer from obvious misalignments and obvious lighting changes…"

What also impressed me about Max's work is his choice for printing his gigapixel files. He uses a LightJet to print his highly detailed images. It is a perfect illustration of the power of the machine. You can read the title off of the books in this shot of the Library of Congress Reading Room. You can't do that with an inkjet.

Harlem Gigapixel Image

Artist Geard Maynard in collaboration with Kolor Company created an enormous file taken from the rooftop at 7th Ave & 110th St in New York City. Gerard provided the images and Kolor provided the seaming software, Autopano Pro. The resulting 13 Gigapixel image is a combination of 2,045 12 megapixel shots that took 46 hours to render. They had to set up a special hardware for the rendering, a dual xeon quad-core processor with 8 GB memory and 2 high-speed 150 GB hard drives to make it happen. Gerard also has other composites on his website he has created that he prints with a LightJet.

Gigapixel gallery

Pretty soon every photographer will need to get more powerful computers to work on. Gigapixel photography seems to be the wave of the future. The folks at xRez Extreme Resolution Photography have a gallery of images available for people to play around. You can 'visit' anywhere from Boston to Yosemite. It is like the ultimate game of Where's Waldo when you start zooming in and out and take a look at the amazing detail of these images. I am salivating at the chance to print one of these on the LightJet.