World's largest photograph

[Lancashire Lad]

Originally Posted by Adam Cheeseman

and why not use a wide-angle or fish-eye lens?....

Hi Adam, when you zoom into a digital wide-angle / fish-eye shot, you very soon reach the point where pixellation occurs.

However, if you divided that shot into many sections, and imagine that each separate section had been taken with a telephoto prime, then you would be able to zoom a long way into each small section before pixellation occured.

Stitch all those small sections together, and you effectively get one wide angle shot withan incredible number of pixels, and which can be zoomed in to an equally incredible degree. - So the single "final" image contains a vast amount of viewable information.


No one has mentioned it so far on the thread, but the record is currently held by this 272Gigapixel image of the Shanghai skyline, stitched from 12,000 individual shots. (So a little way to go yet Dave. ).
GigaPan

Regards,
Mike.

[earthdragon64]

Originally Posted by Lancashire Lad

No one has mentioned it so far on the thread, but the record is currently held by this 272Gigapixel image of the Shanghai skyline, stitched from 12,000 individual shots. (So a little way to go yet Dave. ).
GigaPan

Regards,
Mike.

I found my Cairngorm stitch with 9 shots tricky enough, and that was using panorama maker software.

Mine was hand-held though, which probably isn't the best way to go, if I do it again I'll use a tripod for the individual shots.

Regards, Audrey.

[pressld2]

I've taken the next step and almost doubled my last effort with this one...



52 source images in two rows of 26, stitched into a 258 megapixel image that is 39,955 pixels wide and 6457 pixels high. The 16bit tiff file is 1.5Gb and even the digital negative is 803Mb.

I have now reached, if not slightly exceeded, what my current hardware can cope with. I was up until 2:30am on Saturday morning and spent most of yesterday working on it too, as some of the stitchings took hours. It's taking Lightroom over ten minutes just to render the preview. I need a memory upgrade at the very least before attempting anything larger, and a solid state drive wouldn't hurt either.

As the largest image that the WAB software will display is 1600 pixels wide, I've uploaded a few cut-outs of details from the full panorama to give a better idea of the resolution...


At the left is the London Bridge Shard nearing completion (I believe it's due to open in May) with the tip of the BT Tower just to the right of it. Moving along is St Paul's with Tower Bridge in front of it, while on the right are the three main towers of the City - Tower 42 (popularly known as the NatWest tower), Swiss Re (the Gherkin) and the new Heron Tower.


Work on restoring the Cutty Sark continues.


The National Maritime Museum.


The Queen's House with the towers of the Royal Naval College behind.


The main docklands complex, with 1 Canada Square (Canary Wharf) prominent. The green line cutting across the image is the laser that shines from the Royal Observatory northwards along the Greenwich meridian. In the full size panorama it's visible from the left hand edge almost to the Dome but you can't make it out clearly in the version uploaded here.


The Millennium Dome, now the London O2 Arena.

Although this is my favourite view of London, I'm yearning to get up a mountain and try this with something a bit wilder!

Dave P.