What you see above is the inside of the world’s largest pinhole camera measuring 45x160x80 feet. It’s an abandoned airplane hangar in Irvine, California that was converted over the course of two months into a gigantic pinhole camera. 24,000 square feet of plastic, 1,300 gallons of foam filler, 1.52 miles of tape, and 40 cans of spray paint went into darkening the hangar.
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Jeffrey Martin, the guy behind the world’s largest indoor photo, has done it again — the founder of 360cities was hired by Wembley Stadium to shoot a massive 20 gigapixel 360-degree panorama of the 2011 FA Cup Final this past weekend. About 1000 photographs shot with a DSLR and robotic tripod head were needed to capture the 90,000 fans in attendance, and the final image was processed with a workstation that had 192 gigabytes of RAM and 24 CPU cores!
Check out the final photo here or read about how it was made. You can also tag people you know in the image — tens of thousands have been identified and tagged already.
What you see above is the largest true-color photograph of the night sky ever created, shot by 28-year-old amateur astrophotographer Nick Risinger using six astronomical cameras. It’s not just the view of the sky from one location, but is instead a 360-panoramic view of the sky taken by trekking 60,000 miles across the western United States and South Africa starting in March 2010. The final image is composed of 37,000 separate photographs. Check out the massive zoomable high-definition version of the photo here.
Photopic Sky Survey (via Wired)
Thanks for the tip Udi!
Photographer Jeffrey Martin, founder of 360cities, recently use a Canon 550D and 200mm lens to shoot the largest indoor photograph ever made: a ginormous 40 gigapixel photograph of a 18th-century baroque library in the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Czech Republic. Over 5 days of shooting with his robot control camera, Martin collected 2,947 separate photos that went into the resulting panorama. The RAW photos then took a day to batch process, 111 hours to stitch, and 20 hours to Photoshop, finally ending as a single 283 gigabyte photograph.
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Jeffrey Martin spent three days shooting a massive 80 gigapixel panorama of London, which is now the largest 360-degree panorama in the world. He writes,
This is an 80-gigapixel panoramic photo, made from 7886 individual images. This panorama was shot from the top of the Centre Point building in central London, in the summer of 2010. We hope that the varied sights and energy of London have been captured here in a way never done before, so that you can experience one of the world’s great cities – wherever you may be right now.
It’s pretty crazy how you can zoom into individual windows and clearly see people walking on sidewalks.
London 80 Gigapixels (via Gizmodo)
A week ago Canon announced the development of a APS-H CMOS sensor that delivers a staggering 120 megapixels. Not content with ruling the megapixel race, they’ve just announced a physically gigantic sensor — the largest CMOS sensor in the world.
In the photo above, the sensor is shown next to a standard 35mm full frame sensor. The thing measures 202 x 205 mm (or 7.95 x 8.07 inches), or 40 times the size of current sensors, and is extremely sensitive. It can supposedly record 60fps video under moonlight. Potential applications of this kind of sensor include capturing the night sky and documenting nocturnal animal behavior, though (like the 120MP sensor) you probably shouldn’t expect this to hit the consumer market anytime in the near or semi-distant future.
Just a couple months after we reported that a 45-gigapixel photo of Dubai had become the world’s largest, a new panorama has arrived to steal the crown. 70 Billion Pixels Budapest is a 70-gigapixel panorama of Budapest created using a setup of two 25-megapixel Sony A900 cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters. Four days of shooting resulted in 20,000 images, and an additional two days of post-processing produced a single 200 GB file. If printed, the size of the photo would be about two apartment blocks long and ten stories tall.
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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.
Robotic panorama devices are making the creation of gigantic photographs easier and easier. Donovan used a Gigapan EPIC Pro to create his image, along with a Canon 7D and 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L at 400mm. After 3.5 hours of shooting, he had 4,250 JPG images that took up 27.5 GB of his 32GB memory card. If the photograph were to be printed, it would result in a print the size of nearly 1,200 billboards.
Check out the photograph over at Gigapan.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing how the photograph was made:
You can also check out the previous largest photographs in Wikipedia’s article on the subject.
Image credit: Photography by Gerald Donovan
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.
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:
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.
This second image has less gigapixels than the previous one, but is a 360-degree panorama, meaning you can look in every direction:
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)
