Two Largest Photographs in the World

 

It’s quite a coincidence, but two of the largest images in the world were both announced recently. These images were created by taking thousands of individual high-resolution photographs and stitching them together to create gigantic panoramas.

Dresden – 26 gigapixels

The first, and the largest image in the world currently in terms of megapixels, is a panorama of Desden, Germany. It boasts a whopping 26 gigapixels:

desden

It was created using 1,665 individual 21.4 Megapixel photographs taken with a Canon 5D Mk II and a 400mm lens. A robot was used to shoot the photographs, and spent 172 minutes capturing the images. The 102 gigabytes of RAW data that resulted took 48GB of memory, 16 processors, and 94 hours to convert.

The photo was taken on the roof of the building “Haus der Presse” and starts at the left side with the Ostragehege. You can see the Congress Center and the Maritim Hotel rightwards. In the center is the city of Dresden with the famous Semperoper (back view), the castle and the Church of Our Lady. In the background is the television tower and you can identify outlines of the Saxon Switzerland. In the right part you can see the south of Dresden.

Prague – 18 gigapixels

This second image has less gigapixels than the previous one, but is a 360-degree panorama, meaning you can look in every direction:

prague

Hundreds of shots were taken over a few hours, and weeks were spent stitching the image. It was created by Jeffrey Martin the founder of 360cities.

Gigapixel Dresden (via PhotographyBLOG)
Prague TV Tower (via TechCrunch)


 

View Comments

  1. this pic is sooo cool.

  2. Mallory Dash says:

    This is awesome!

  3. Nicki says:

    Dresden! Thats my hometown, nice to see this capture! Impressive :D

  4. Jason says:

    First thing I asked for on my list from Santa!!! A Nikon D3s.

  5. Oops, you commented on the wrong entry Jason. The giveaway is here:

    http://www.petapixel.com/2009/12/18/ho-ho-ho-a-...

  6. this pic is sooo cool.

  7. Mallory Dash says:

    This is awesome!

  8. Nicki says:

    Dresden! Thats my hometown, nice to see this capture! Impressive :D

  9. Jason says:

    First thing I asked for on my list from Santa!!! A Nikon D3s.

  10. Oops, you commented on the wrong entry Jason. The giveaway is here:

    http://www.petapixel.com/2009/12/18/ho-ho-ho-a-...

  11. Great post… I had seen one of Cape Town a bit back and excited to see others. Thanks for sharing. Here is the one from South Africa http://shar.es/aDDqQ

  12. [...] Everything big is Dubai. They boast the world’s tallest building, the world’s largest shopping mall, and now the world’s largest photograph. Gerald Donovan recently created the 45-gigapixel panorama of the Dubai skyline as a technical test to explore the limits of hardware and software. At the end of last year, the largest photo in the world was a 26 gigapixel shot of Dresden, Germany. [...]

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