WoW..Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier

http://www.tawbaware.c​om/maxlyons/gigapixel.​htm

bill fr Ohio

Some cool stuff... makes me wanna mess with it some.

james01 wrote:
Some cool stuff... makes me wanna mess with it some.

Makes me wonder if the he lived across from this valley and took a hundred pictures a Day..it would be easy to forget where you left off.........

If the guy had explained his setup (either machanical or computer controlled) for coordinating the different shots (frames) then I would be a little more inclined to believe that he actually did shoot those pictures and framed them together. But from the little information that I've read at the web site, I'm a little skeptical.

I'm not saying it can't be done. What I am saying is that I find it hard to believe that he did it all on his own, just pointing the camera towards the mountain and getting every little frame needed to make up the total gigapixel worth of image.

I am also skeptic because I like to make panoramic picture from multiple shots.I'am skeptic because its a very detail shot and would take a very long time to line up pictures.If you mistake one picture (you found that mistake when you back home)you cannot repeat because of light conditions.There never the same.But if he telling the truth than bravo for him.

I ahve played with this some. Mostly with Canon's Photo Stitch program. I have had pretty good luck. I put 12 pics together from out at Perdanales Falls State Park in Texas. It was nice when shrunk to fit on the screen, but to truley get an appreciation for it, I would need to print it out poster size...

Speaking of which, anyone have a handle on just where I could get a 16-or-so long shot panoramic printed out? I don't have a printer that handles roll paper, and I haven't seen any of the usual suspect web sites that offer printing services mention handling long panoramics.

You would think that with the popularity of being able to do assisted pano's with a bunch of the digicams (my Nikon Coolpix 4500 being an example, and happened to be used for this particular shot in FL, before I bought my 300D), that a bunch of sites like snapfish, etc. would offer a means to print them out seamlessly. I can get them mounted, matted, and framed at a local shop.

I have a really nice beach scene, that I'd like to surprise the missus with for the holidays. She really likes the ocean, you see...

Hm, I wonder what the gigapixel guy would do to get his shot printed? I've seen wall-size murals for sale (lunar landscape, etc.), but those are screen printed. It would be super cool to take a big mosaic shot of some favorite venue and get it printed wall-sized...

I think the skeptics here should think a bit about what he must have done to capture the original image. I also think that had that been the focus of his essay: the discussion of how to take 196 coordinated pictures, he probably would have discussed it. However, his goal was to describe the process of stitching a very large image.

A good tripod, perhaps one with a motor drive similar to what you might find on a tracking telescope was used. Clearly, one can't take that many pictures with a handheld camera!

Lots of very hard work to make this work. I hope that someone will work with him to print this thing out. Then I hope he will display it publicly within a 100 miles of where I live.

My point: let's focus on the accomplishment!

I've done some stitching, but only up to 12 or 24 frames. If you have the camera in landscape orientation, that is customary, but if you tripod it in portrait orientation, you can get more pixels into the overall composite. However, all this holds water only on a single band of frames composited. If you had to go to multiple bands, like this one shows, it has to be horrendously more complicated than a single band.

My printer will print up to 13"x44", and that is sufficient for me. Actually, printing it on 13"x19" paper was good, because I could print three strips of the same composite on the same sheet of paper. That was sufficient to get oohs and aahs from ordinary folk, but not for real experts.

---Bob Gross---

Wow,. this dude is in serious need of a wider angle lens for his 10D!!!!

I am not "wowed!" at the picture size, although I am wowed at his work, patience-wise.
Picture size wouldn't matter simply because if someone takes 600 frames for a panorama with a 1 megapixel camera, then I assume you'll also have a gigapixel file...

You also have to some pretty high-end computer power to handle such an image. Even though my computer has 512Mb of memory, I doubt it could handle that size of a file. It is impressive though it isn't much more than a curiosity.

Reading his entire web site (most of it) there are a few things to point out to the sceptics.

"Number of pixels in source images: 1,233,125,376 (196 images * 3072*2048)" - there's a lot of overlap there.

"So, my solution was to modify some of the existing programs in my workflow, and write a number of new software programs to create this image. "

"A Beginner's Guide To Creating Stitched Images Using PTAssembler"
http://www.tawbaware.c​om/ptasmblr_tutorial.h​tm

"Panoramas and Perspective Control"
http://www.tawbaware.c​om/panprob.htm

He wrote a program (http://www.tawbaware.c​om/ptasmblr.htm) to assist with using Panrama Tools

After reading all this one begins to get the idea that he really does know what he's doing and what he's talking about.

As to printing this thing, " However, I'm interested in hearing from anyone who would like to partner with me on printing this image. " Yah, at 300 DPI it's 11 feet wide...

Well, since I intially asked about where one might go about getting large or panoramic shots printed, I've come across at least two resources:

Pitko, http://www.pikto.ca/, introduced in an article at luminous-landscape, http://www.luminous-landscape.com/location​s/pikto.shtml, is a full-service digital photo haven in Toronto. Vey nice setup, and of course, handy for those in the Toronto area, especially. Wonder how many other shops like this have sprung up in major metropolitan areas, or are about to?

http://www.wide-format-printers.org/, which was pointed out in the recent Slashdot.org article on the gigapixel shot. This site has a ton of links to information about large format printers, and promotes itself as the premier site for wide format printers and printing. Having just glanced at it so far, I'm not sure if either the FLAAR organization that runs the site, or one or more partners, actually offer printing as a service bureau to photographers or not. They have been (still are?) tied to several universities, both in the U.S. and in Guatemala, and the site is full of praise for one Professor Hellmuth, apparently a local folk hero, of sorts.

There was a very similiar shot done of Congress Hall? in DC same number of shots, same layout on web page (like exactly same layout on web page). I actually preferred that one as a better example.

I am not impressed by the size of the image, but I am by the effort involved. I used to work with much larger images on a daily basis (But I am not allowed to say how large). The effort required to take the pictures he did is what is impressive to me.